http://news.yahoo.com/s/huffpost/20051107/...57_200511071556
Carol Platt Liebau: A "Rogue Agency" Carol Platt Liebau
Mon Nov 7, 3:56 PM ET
That's how Senator John McCain has described the CIA -- and about this, at least, he seems to be right.
As Deborah Orin points out in today's New York Post:
Having [Joe] Wilson go public was very useful to the CIA, especially the division where his wife worked — because it served to shift blame for failed "slam dunk" intelligence claims away from the agency. To say that Bush "twisted" intelligence was to presume — falsely — that the CIA had gotten it right.
When the White House ineptly tried to counter Wilson's tall tales by revealing that he wasn't an expert and his wife set up the trip, the CIA demanded a criminal probe — and then itself broke the law by leaking that news.
It now appears the CIA's entire referral was dishonest: The agency knew Plame wasn't a covert agent under the terms of the law, since she hadn't had an overseas posting in the past five years — and obviously neither she nor the CIA was taking proper precautions to protect her identity. Call it disinformation.
Those at the CIA who were involved in all this had better hope that the American people are no better at "connecting the dots" than they are.
Cross posted at CarolLiebau.blogspot.com
Copyright © 2005 HuffingtonPost.com. All rights reserved. The information contained in Huffington Post commentary may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without prior written authority of huffingtonpost.com.
Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
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Full Version: Prisoner Abuse News, Commentary & Discussion
http://www.sltrib.com/ci_3190557?rss
Yemenis' accounts validate existence of secret CIA prisons
Amnesty report: The 3 men discuss the lockups, and accounts of guards in all-black 'ninja' suits
By Josh White
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Three Yemeni nationals who were arrested in late 2003 say they were transferred to U.S. custody and kept isolated in at least four secret detention facilities that Amnesty International officials believe could be part of a covert CIA prison system.
The three detainees have not said they were physically abused while in U.S. custody, but they describe being whisked away in airplanes to unknown locations where they were interrogated by Americans in civilian clothes, according to an Amnesty International report. At one prison, the detainees were guarded by people in all-black ''ninja'' suits, who communicated using hand gestures.
During their separate incarcerations, the detainees were never visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross, never had access to lawyers, were unable to correspond with their families and had no contact with the outside world, the report said. Their families believed they were dead or were told that they had gone to Iraq to fight the U.S.
The accounts, taken in independent interviews by Amnesty International researchers over the past few months, appear to be consistent with reports of a network of secret CIA detention facilities, according to the report. The detainees could not determine where they were because they were hooded during the flights, but because of the travel time they assumed they were in Europe or the Middle East, according to Amnesty International.
''We've tried working out where they might have been, but it's so subjective,'' said Anne FitzGerald, senior adviser on research policy for Amnesty International, who interviewed the detainees in two Yemeni prisons. ''It's clear they were in facilities
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that were designed to hold many people, not just them. But they really didn't know where they were.''
In a telephone interview from London last week, FitzGerald said she believes the detainees' stories are credible because they were detained separately and were unable to communicate with one another before the United States turned them over to the Yemeni government in May. One of the detainees has never met the other two and is now kept in a separate facility, yet his story is consistent, she said.
FitzGerald said two of the detainees were barely interrogated after their first few weeks.
All three were released to Yemeni authorities in May. Two are in the central prison in Aden, and one is at a security prison at Al Ghaydah. Their families now know they are alive, FitzGerald said.
''The cases of the three 'disappeared' Yemenis documented in this report . . . suggest that the network of clandestine interrogation centres is not reserved solely for high-value detainees, but may be larger, more comprehensive and better organized than previously suspected,'' the report says.
Yemenis' accounts validate existence of secret CIA prisons
Amnesty report: The 3 men discuss the lockups, and accounts of guards in all-black 'ninja' suits
By Josh White
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON - Three Yemeni nationals who were arrested in late 2003 say they were transferred to U.S. custody and kept isolated in at least four secret detention facilities that Amnesty International officials believe could be part of a covert CIA prison system.
The three detainees have not said they were physically abused while in U.S. custody, but they describe being whisked away in airplanes to unknown locations where they were interrogated by Americans in civilian clothes, according to an Amnesty International report. At one prison, the detainees were guarded by people in all-black ''ninja'' suits, who communicated using hand gestures.
During their separate incarcerations, the detainees were never visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross, never had access to lawyers, were unable to correspond with their families and had no contact with the outside world, the report said. Their families believed they were dead or were told that they had gone to Iraq to fight the U.S.
The accounts, taken in independent interviews by Amnesty International researchers over the past few months, appear to be consistent with reports of a network of secret CIA detention facilities, according to the report. The detainees could not determine where they were because they were hooded during the flights, but because of the travel time they assumed they were in Europe or the Middle East, according to Amnesty International.
''We've tried working out where they might have been, but it's so subjective,'' said Anne FitzGerald, senior adviser on research policy for Amnesty International, who interviewed the detainees in two Yemeni prisons. ''It's clear they were in facilities
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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that were designed to hold many people, not just them. But they really didn't know where they were.''
In a telephone interview from London last week, FitzGerald said she believes the detainees' stories are credible because they were detained separately and were unable to communicate with one another before the United States turned them over to the Yemeni government in May. One of the detainees has never met the other two and is now kept in a separate facility, yet his story is consistent, she said.
FitzGerald said two of the detainees were barely interrogated after their first few weeks.
All three were released to Yemeni authorities in May. Two are in the central prison in Aden, and one is at a security prison at Al Ghaydah. Their families now know they are alive, FitzGerald said.
''The cases of the three 'disappeared' Yemenis documented in this report . . . suggest that the network of clandestine interrogation centres is not reserved solely for high-value detainees, but may be larger, more comprehensive and better organized than previously suspected,'' the report says.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1859288,00.html
The Sunday Times November 06, 2005
‘Gulag’ leak from CIA men
Tony Allen-Mills
EASTERN European countries were yesterday scrambling to distance themselves from the CIA as officials in Washington searched for the source of an embarrassing leak that exposed a programme of secret jails for terrorist detainees.
Claims that the CIA has been hiding prominent Al-Qaeda members at a so-called “black site” facility in eastern Europe have prompted angry denials from Romania, Poland and Albania.
As details emerged yesterday of CIA flights to remote military airfields in northeast Poland and southeast Romania, George W Bush’s administration ordered an internal inquiry into how classified data was leaked to The Washington Post and Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group.
Senior intelligence sources blamed the leak on CIA officers unhappy at having to maintain what one former counter-terrorism official described as “secret gulags”.
The prisons are believed to hold at least 30 Al-Qaeda leaders labelled “ghost detainees” by Human Rights Watch. Many no longer have any intelligence value, but the CIA has been ordered to shield them from international scrutiny or legal proceedings.
The publication of flight logs detailing CIA movements has focused attention on a former military base at Szczytno-Szymany in Poland.
Polish officials acknowledged that a Boeing 737 carrying seven Americans landed at the base in September 2003 and took five others on board. The plane continued to the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base in Romania, then to the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba.
Poland and Romania said the plane’s stops had nothing to do with prisoner transfers. Other sources said Albania or Macedonia might have co-operated with the CIA.
The Sunday Times November 06, 2005
‘Gulag’ leak from CIA men
Tony Allen-Mills
EASTERN European countries were yesterday scrambling to distance themselves from the CIA as officials in Washington searched for the source of an embarrassing leak that exposed a programme of secret jails for terrorist detainees.
Claims that the CIA has been hiding prominent Al-Qaeda members at a so-called “black site” facility in eastern Europe have prompted angry denials from Romania, Poland and Albania.
As details emerged yesterday of CIA flights to remote military airfields in northeast Poland and southeast Romania, George W Bush’s administration ordered an internal inquiry into how classified data was leaked to The Washington Post and Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group.
Senior intelligence sources blamed the leak on CIA officers unhappy at having to maintain what one former counter-terrorism official described as “secret gulags”.
The prisons are believed to hold at least 30 Al-Qaeda leaders labelled “ghost detainees” by Human Rights Watch. Many no longer have any intelligence value, but the CIA has been ordered to shield them from international scrutiny or legal proceedings.
The publication of flight logs detailing CIA movements has focused attention on a former military base at Szczytno-Szymany in Poland.
Polish officials acknowledged that a Boeing 737 carrying seven Americans landed at the base in September 2003 and took five others on board. The plane continued to the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base in Romania, then to the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba.
Poland and Romania said the plane’s stops had nothing to do with prisoner transfers. Other sources said Albania or Macedonia might have co-operated with the CIA.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051107/ap_on_...inees&printer=1
Senate, Cheney Split Over Ban on Torture By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer
A leading Republican senator said Sunday that the Bush administration is making "a terrible mistake" in opposing a congressional ban on torture and other inhuman treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.
Sen. Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record), considered a potential presidential candidate in 2008, said many Republican senators support the ban proposed by Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.
The ban was approved by a 90-9 vote last month in the Senate and added to a defense spending bill. The White House has threatened a veto, but the fate of the proposal depends on House-Senate negotiations that will reconcile different versions of the spending measure. The House's does not include the ban.
Vice President Dick Cheney has lobbied Republican senators to allow an exemption for those held by the CIA if preventing an attack is at stake.
"I think the administration is making a terrible mistake in opposing John McCain's amendment on detainees and torture," Hagel, R-Neb., said on "This Week" on ABC. "Why in the world they're doing that, I don't know."
McCain, citing the Senate vote as well as support from the public and from former Secretary of State Colin Powell and others with government service, said he will push the issue with the White House "as far as necessary."
"We need to get this issue behind us," McCain said on "Fox News Sunday." "Our image in the world is suffering very badly, and one of the reasons for it is the perception that we abuse people that we take captive."
Mistreatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and allegations of mistreatment at the U.S.-run camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have drawn withering criticism from around the world. Human rights organizations also contend that the United States sends detainees to countries that it knows will use torture to try to extract intelligence information.
When the White House failed to kill the anti-torture provision while it was pending in the Senate, it began arguing for an exemption in cases of "clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States."
The president would have to approve the exemption, according to the administration proposal, and any activity would have to be consistent with the Constitution, federal law and U.S. treaty obligations.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record), R-Utah, said he supports the vice president's efforts to gain a CIA exemption. While contending that the administration opposes torture, Hatch said, "They're going to everything in their power to make sure that our citizens in the United States of America are protected."
Appearing with Hatch on CBS's "Face the Nation," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners "is not what America is all about. Those aren't the values that we're fighting for."
Sen. Pat Roberts (news, bio, voting record), the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his vote against the ban doesn't mean he favors torture. He rejected Durbin's comments as "not really relevant to what we are trying to do to detain and interrogate the worst of the worst so that we can save American lives."
Roberts said that success with detention and interrogation depends on the detainee's fear of the unknown. He suggested that passing a law and putting U.S. policies into a manual would tell detainees too much about what to expect.
"As long as you're following the Constitution and there's no torture and no inhumane treatment, I see nothing wrong with saying here is the worst of the worst. We know they have specific information to save American lives in terrorist attacks around the world. That's what we're talking about," Roberts said.
Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Senate, Cheney Split Over Ban on Torture By DOUGLASS K. DANIEL, Associated Press Writer
A leading Republican senator said Sunday that the Bush administration is making "a terrible mistake" in opposing a congressional ban on torture and other inhuman treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody.
Sen. Chuck Hagel (news, bio, voting record), considered a potential presidential candidate in 2008, said many Republican senators support the ban proposed by Sen. John McCain (news, bio, voting record), R-Ariz., a prisoner of war during the Vietnam War.
The ban was approved by a 90-9 vote last month in the Senate and added to a defense spending bill. The White House has threatened a veto, but the fate of the proposal depends on House-Senate negotiations that will reconcile different versions of the spending measure. The House's does not include the ban.
Vice President Dick Cheney has lobbied Republican senators to allow an exemption for those held by the CIA if preventing an attack is at stake.
"I think the administration is making a terrible mistake in opposing John McCain's amendment on detainees and torture," Hagel, R-Neb., said on "This Week" on ABC. "Why in the world they're doing that, I don't know."
McCain, citing the Senate vote as well as support from the public and from former Secretary of State Colin Powell and others with government service, said he will push the issue with the White House "as far as necessary."
"We need to get this issue behind us," McCain said on "Fox News Sunday." "Our image in the world is suffering very badly, and one of the reasons for it is the perception that we abuse people that we take captive."
Mistreatment of prisoners at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and allegations of mistreatment at the U.S.-run camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have drawn withering criticism from around the world. Human rights organizations also contend that the United States sends detainees to countries that it knows will use torture to try to extract intelligence information.
When the White House failed to kill the anti-torture provision while it was pending in the Senate, it began arguing for an exemption in cases of "clandestine counterterrorism operations conducted abroad, with respect to terrorists who are not citizens of the United States."
The president would have to approve the exemption, according to the administration proposal, and any activity would have to be consistent with the Constitution, federal law and U.S. treaty obligations.
Sen. Orrin Hatch (news, bio, voting record), R-Utah, said he supports the vice president's efforts to gain a CIA exemption. While contending that the administration opposes torture, Hatch said, "They're going to everything in their power to make sure that our citizens in the United States of America are protected."
Appearing with Hatch on CBS's "Face the Nation," Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners "is not what America is all about. Those aren't the values that we're fighting for."
Sen. Pat Roberts (news, bio, voting record), the Kansas Republican who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said his vote against the ban doesn't mean he favors torture. He rejected Durbin's comments as "not really relevant to what we are trying to do to detain and interrogate the worst of the worst so that we can save American lives."
Roberts said that success with detention and interrogation depends on the detainee's fear of the unknown. He suggested that passing a law and putting U.S. policies into a manual would tell detainees too much about what to expect.
"As long as you're following the Constitution and there's no torture and no inhumane treatment, I see nothing wrong with saying here is the worst of the worst. We know they have specific information to save American lives in terrorist attacks around the world. That's what we're talking about," Roberts said.
Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
Copyright © 2005 Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
http://ap.tbo.com/ap/breaking/MGBO0AYVQFE.html
Bush Defends Administration's Policy on Detention of Terrorist Suspects
By Deb Riechmann Associated Press Writer
Published: Nov 7, 2005
PANAMA CITY, Panama (AP)- U.S. President Bush on Monday vigorously defended attempts to interrogate suspected terrorists after the public disclosure of secret CIA prisoner camps in eastern European countries. "We do not torture," he declared.
"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again," Bush said. "So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law."
Over White House opposition, the Senate has passed legislation banning torture. With Vice President Dick Cheney as the point man, the administration is seeking an exemption for the CIA. It was recently disclosed that the agency maintains a network of prisons in eastern Europe and Asia, where it holds terrorist suspects.
The European Union is investigating the reports, which have not been confirmed by the White House.
"Our country is at war and our government has the obligation to protect the American people," Bush said. "Any activity we conduct is within the law. We do not torture."
Bush pointedly noted that Congress as well as the White House has an obligation to protect U.S. citizens.
He spoke at a news conference with Panamanian President Martin Torrijos on last day of five-day Latin America trip. Bush ends the day in Virginia at a political event.
On another issue, Bush ducked another question about the CIA leak investigation, declining to say whether he has lived up to his campaign pledge to abide by the spirit of ethics laws.
"We take this investigation very seriously and we'll continue to cooperate during the investigation," he said.
Bush Defends Administration's Policy on Detention of Terrorist Suspects
By Deb Riechmann Associated Press Writer
Published: Nov 7, 2005
PANAMA CITY, Panama (AP)- U.S. President Bush on Monday vigorously defended attempts to interrogate suspected terrorists after the public disclosure of secret CIA prisoner camps in eastern European countries. "We do not torture," he declared.
"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again," Bush said. "So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law."
Over White House opposition, the Senate has passed legislation banning torture. With Vice President Dick Cheney as the point man, the administration is seeking an exemption for the CIA. It was recently disclosed that the agency maintains a network of prisons in eastern Europe and Asia, where it holds terrorist suspects.
The European Union is investigating the reports, which have not been confirmed by the White House.
"Our country is at war and our government has the obligation to protect the American people," Bush said. "Any activity we conduct is within the law. We do not torture."
Bush pointedly noted that Congress as well as the White House has an obligation to protect U.S. citizens.
He spoke at a news conference with Panamanian President Martin Torrijos on last day of five-day Latin America trip. Bush ends the day in Virginia at a political event.
On another issue, Bush ducked another question about the CIA leak investigation, declining to say whether he has lived up to his campaign pledge to abide by the spirit of ethics laws.
"We take this investigation very seriously and we'll continue to cooperate during the investigation," he said.
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=100...=top_world_news
U.S. Supreme Court Will Review Guantanamo Military Tribunals
Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether the Bush administration can use military tribunals to try terrorism suspects, agreeing to consider an appeal from a man accused of being Osama bin Laden's driver.
Yemenese national Salim Ahmed Hamdan contends that President George W. Bush went beyond his authority in establishing the tribunals and that the procedures would violate the Geneva Convention protections for prisoners of war.
``In a system of checks and balances, there can never be a time when the rule of law does not circumscribe power as fundamental as adjudicating culpability and punishment,'' Hamdan's lawyers argued in papers filed in Washington. ``Our forefathers paid a heavy price in blood to establish these principles.''
The case threatens Bush's plan for dealing with more than 500 inmates at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, most of them captured almost four years ago in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The administration now must defend its policies before a court that last year said the president didn't have a ``blank check'' to fight terrorism.
New Chief Justice John Roberts, who was a member of the appeals court panel that upheld the tribunals, didn't participate in today's decision to hear the case. He said in a written questionnaire in August he won't take part in cases he considered as an appellate judge.
The court probably won't hear arguments until March, by which time a new justice may have been confirmed to succeed retiring Sandra Day O'Connor.
Unanimous Decision
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in July ruled 3-0 that Congress authorized the president to set up military tribunals when it approved the use of force to fight terrorism following the Sept. 11 attacks. The court also said the Geneva Convention isn't enforceable in federal court and doesn't apply to members of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
Solicitor General Paul Clement, the administration's top courtroom lawyer, said in court papers that the appeals court correctly concluded the Geneva Convention doesn't authorize detainees to sue in federal court.
The treaty's provisions ``make clear that disagreements and alleged violations are to be addressed via state-to-state negotiations and neutral-party oversight, not by domestic courts,'' Clement wrote.
The tribunals don't offer all the rights afforded to other U.S. criminal defendants. They permit exclusion of the accused from parts of the proceeding, allow witness statements in place of sworn testimony, and direct appeals to either the defense secretary or president, Hamdan's legal team said.
Bodyguard and Driver
Clement said that those issues might not prove relevant in Hamdan's case. He urged the Supreme Court not to get involved at least until Hamdan's trial was completed.
Hamdan's legal team, led by Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal, said in court papers that ``significant damage to the fabric of American law will ensue'' without immediate high court intervention.
The trial was put on hold last year after a federal district judge in Washington ruled that Hamdan was entitled to be treated as a prisoner of war until a ``competent authority'' concluded otherwise. The D.C. Circuit then reversed that ruling.
The Justice Department says Hamdan, who says he is about 36, served as a bodyguard for bin Laden, as well as his personal driver from 1996 to 2001. The government also contends Hamdan delivered weapons and ammunition to al-Qaeda members.
Hamdan says he was captured while trying to flee Afghanistan and return to Yemen with his family.
The case is Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 05-184.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: November 7, 2005 10:03 EST
U.S. Supreme Court Will Review Guantanamo Military Tribunals
Nov. 7 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether the Bush administration can use military tribunals to try terrorism suspects, agreeing to consider an appeal from a man accused of being Osama bin Laden's driver.
Yemenese national Salim Ahmed Hamdan contends that President George W. Bush went beyond his authority in establishing the tribunals and that the procedures would violate the Geneva Convention protections for prisoners of war.
``In a system of checks and balances, there can never be a time when the rule of law does not circumscribe power as fundamental as adjudicating culpability and punishment,'' Hamdan's lawyers argued in papers filed in Washington. ``Our forefathers paid a heavy price in blood to establish these principles.''
The case threatens Bush's plan for dealing with more than 500 inmates at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, most of them captured almost four years ago in the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan. The administration now must defend its policies before a court that last year said the president didn't have a ``blank check'' to fight terrorism.
New Chief Justice John Roberts, who was a member of the appeals court panel that upheld the tribunals, didn't participate in today's decision to hear the case. He said in a written questionnaire in August he won't take part in cases he considered as an appellate judge.
The court probably won't hear arguments until March, by which time a new justice may have been confirmed to succeed retiring Sandra Day O'Connor.
Unanimous Decision
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit in July ruled 3-0 that Congress authorized the president to set up military tribunals when it approved the use of force to fight terrorism following the Sept. 11 attacks. The court also said the Geneva Convention isn't enforceable in federal court and doesn't apply to members of bin Laden's al-Qaeda network.
Solicitor General Paul Clement, the administration's top courtroom lawyer, said in court papers that the appeals court correctly concluded the Geneva Convention doesn't authorize detainees to sue in federal court.
The treaty's provisions ``make clear that disagreements and alleged violations are to be addressed via state-to-state negotiations and neutral-party oversight, not by domestic courts,'' Clement wrote.
The tribunals don't offer all the rights afforded to other U.S. criminal defendants. They permit exclusion of the accused from parts of the proceeding, allow witness statements in place of sworn testimony, and direct appeals to either the defense secretary or president, Hamdan's legal team said.
Bodyguard and Driver
Clement said that those issues might not prove relevant in Hamdan's case. He urged the Supreme Court not to get involved at least until Hamdan's trial was completed.
Hamdan's legal team, led by Georgetown University law professor Neal Katyal, said in court papers that ``significant damage to the fabric of American law will ensue'' without immediate high court intervention.
The trial was put on hold last year after a federal district judge in Washington ruled that Hamdan was entitled to be treated as a prisoner of war until a ``competent authority'' concluded otherwise. The D.C. Circuit then reversed that ruling.
The Justice Department says Hamdan, who says he is about 36, served as a bodyguard for bin Laden, as well as his personal driver from 1996 to 2001. The government also contends Hamdan delivered weapons and ammunition to al-Qaeda members.
Hamdan says he was captured while trying to flee Afghanistan and return to Yemen with his family.
The case is Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, 05-184.
To contact the reporter on this story:
Greg Stohr in Washington at gstohr@bloomberg.net.
Last Updated: November 7, 2005 10:03 EST
Bush Defends US Interrogation Policy ABC News
President Bush Defends Administration's Policy on Detention of Terrorism Suspects, Says 'We Do Not Torture'. President Bush on Monday vigorously defended U.S. attempts to interrogate suspected terrorists after the public disclosure of secret CIA prisoner camps in eastern European countries. "We do not torture," he declared.
Bush: 'We do not torture' Minneapolis Star Tribune (subscription)
We do not torture - Bush News24
WHO-TV - all 67 related »
President Bush Defends Administration's Policy on Detention of Terrorism Suspects, Says 'We Do Not Torture'. President Bush on Monday vigorously defended U.S. attempts to interrogate suspected terrorists after the public disclosure of secret CIA prisoner camps in eastern European countries. "We do not torture," he declared.
Bush: 'We do not torture' Minneapolis Star Tribune (subscription)
We do not torture - Bush News24
WHO-TV - all 67 related »
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1107/dailyUpdate.html
Prewar report cast doubt on Iraq-Al Qaeda connection
Also, British newspaper says Blair's "reliable source" on Niger connection was probably a discredited Italian spy.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
A newly declassified document from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) shows that, as early as February 2002, there were doubts about an informer who claimed that there was a strong link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The Associated Press reports that the [Bush] administration was alerted that an "Al Qaeda member in US custody probably was lying about links between the terrorist organization and Iraq."
The document from February 2002 showed that the agency questioned the reliability of Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. He could not name any Iraqis involved in the effort or identify any chemical or biological materials or cite where the training took place, the report said. The agency concluded that al-Libi probably misled the interrogators deliberately, and he recanted the statements in January, according to the document made public by Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat [of Michigan] on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Senator Levin posted excerpts of the report on his website, including a section from the report that read, "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control." Reuters reports, however, that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other administration officials all mentioned Mr. Libi's input as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members. They did not mention him by name at the time. Libi recanted his testimony in January of 2004.
CNN reports that Levin charged that the new evidence showed that the administration continued to accuse Iraq of giving biological and chemical weapons training to Al Qaeda members long after the source of that information had been discredited. And Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D) of West Virginia said "knowing what I know now," he would not have supported the 2002 Congressional resolution that authorized military action against Iraq.
Rockefeller told CNN's "Late Edition" that al-Libi was "an entirely unreliable individual upon whom the White House was placing substantial intelligence trust." He said Sunday's disclosure was another reason the Intelligence Committee needs to wrap up a promised investigation into how policymakers used intelligence data to push for war. The panel's initial probe focused on the quality of the intelligence and not how policymakers used it.
"That is a classic example of a lack of accountability to the American people," Rockefeller said.
Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said, however, the report Levin was quoting was a single document "out of context, without the analysis or any other indication as to how it may have factored in." In an interview with CNN, he called its release "irresponsible and ironic, given the underlying allegation that this selected release is intended to address, namely someone's perception that intelligence was used selectively."
The Los Angeles Times reports that the DIA document was made available to the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies, but "it is not clear whether the Senate intelligence panel had access to it."
Meanwhile, another cornerstone of the prewar intelligence that was used to legitimize the war against Iraq continued to further unravel. Last week, Italian intelligence officials named Rocco Martino, an "occasional spy," as the source of the forged documents that indicated that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. While the US has now said that the Niger information was false, the British government has continued to maintain that the information it received about Niger was credible because it has come from "a foreign intelligence" source. It was the British report that was cited by President Bush in his January 2003 state of the union address.
The British newspaper The Independent, however, reported Sunday that is very likely that the British information on Niger came from Martino. The Independent says Martino had a meeting with Secret Intelligence Service in London as early as the autumn of 2001.
In October 2001, [the Italian military intelligence service] Sismi sent its British and American counterparts a dossier on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger. Whether Rocco Martino delivered it to MI6 headquarters in Vauxhall Cross, as some Italian reports claim, is not clear.
But officials who have examined the British and Italian documents say that some of the same text in these early reports showed up later in the forged documents. And according to Mr. Martino, he approached the British Embassy in Brussels in January of 2003 saying that he had information on Iraq, Niger, and uranium. Both Martino and Gen. Nicolo Pollari of SISMI have said that Martino was working for French intelligence as the time (on a freelance basis) and that this could be behind Britain's claim that a "separate intelligence agency" was the source of the Niger document.
Finally, Knight Ridder reports that, contrary to Italian denials last week, US officials say that SISMI did pass on "bogus allegations to the United States of an Iraqi effort to buy uranium ore from the African nation of Niger for a nuclear bomb program."
Four US officials said the Italian military intelligence agency known as SISMI passed three reports to the CIA station in Rome between October 2001 and March 2002 outlining an alleged deal for Iraq to buy uranium ore, known as yellowcake, from Niger. Yellowcake is refined into the uranium fuel that powers nuclear weapons. The US officials spoke on condition of anonymity because portions of the matter remain classified.
One of the reports passed by SISMI contained language that turned out to have been lifted verbatim from crudely forged documents that outlined the purported uranium-ore deal, the US officials said.
The Independent writes that some Italian media reports have accused General Pollari of working with a group of American neoconservatives to make sure the now discredited "Niger connection" made its way to the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Prewar report cast doubt on Iraq-Al Qaeda connection
Also, British newspaper says Blair's "reliable source" on Niger connection was probably a discredited Italian spy.
By Tom Regan | csmonitor.com
A newly declassified document from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) shows that, as early as February 2002, there were doubts about an informer who claimed that there was a strong link between Al Qaeda and Iraq. The Associated Press reports that the [Bush] administration was alerted that an "Al Qaeda member in US custody probably was lying about links between the terrorist organization and Iraq."
The document from February 2002 showed that the agency questioned the reliability of Al Qaeda senior military trainer Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi. He could not name any Iraqis involved in the effort or identify any chemical or biological materials or cite where the training took place, the report said. The agency concluded that al-Libi probably misled the interrogators deliberately, and he recanted the statements in January, according to the document made public by Senator Carl Levin, top Democrat [of Michigan] on the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Senator Levin posted excerpts of the report on his website, including a section from the report that read, "Saddam's regime is intensely secular and is wary of Islamic revolutionary movements. Moreover, Baghdad is unlikely to provide assistance to a group it cannot control." Reuters reports, however, that President Bush, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell, and other administration officials all mentioned Mr. Libi's input as "credible" evidence that Iraq was training Al Qaeda members. They did not mention him by name at the time. Libi recanted his testimony in January of 2004.
CNN reports that Levin charged that the new evidence showed that the administration continued to accuse Iraq of giving biological and chemical weapons training to Al Qaeda members long after the source of that information had been discredited. And Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D) of West Virginia said "knowing what I know now," he would not have supported the 2002 Congressional resolution that authorized military action against Iraq.
Rockefeller told CNN's "Late Edition" that al-Libi was "an entirely unreliable individual upon whom the White House was placing substantial intelligence trust." He said Sunday's disclosure was another reason the Intelligence Committee needs to wrap up a promised investigation into how policymakers used intelligence data to push for war. The panel's initial probe focused on the quality of the intelligence and not how policymakers used it.
"That is a classic example of a lack of accountability to the American people," Rockefeller said.
Pentagon spokesman Lawrence Di Rita said, however, the report Levin was quoting was a single document "out of context, without the analysis or any other indication as to how it may have factored in." In an interview with CNN, he called its release "irresponsible and ironic, given the underlying allegation that this selected release is intended to address, namely someone's perception that intelligence was used selectively."
The Los Angeles Times reports that the DIA document was made available to the White House, the Pentagon and other agencies, but "it is not clear whether the Senate intelligence panel had access to it."
Meanwhile, another cornerstone of the prewar intelligence that was used to legitimize the war against Iraq continued to further unravel. Last week, Italian intelligence officials named Rocco Martino, an "occasional spy," as the source of the forged documents that indicated that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Niger. While the US has now said that the Niger information was false, the British government has continued to maintain that the information it received about Niger was credible because it has come from "a foreign intelligence" source. It was the British report that was cited by President Bush in his January 2003 state of the union address.
The British newspaper The Independent, however, reported Sunday that is very likely that the British information on Niger came from Martino. The Independent says Martino had a meeting with Secret Intelligence Service in London as early as the autumn of 2001.
In October 2001, [the Italian military intelligence service] Sismi sent its British and American counterparts a dossier on alleged Iraqi attempts to buy uranium from Niger. Whether Rocco Martino delivered it to MI6 headquarters in Vauxhall Cross, as some Italian reports claim, is not clear.
But officials who have examined the British and Italian documents say that some of the same text in these early reports showed up later in the forged documents. And according to Mr. Martino, he approached the British Embassy in Brussels in January of 2003 saying that he had information on Iraq, Niger, and uranium. Both Martino and Gen. Nicolo Pollari of SISMI have said that Martino was working for French intelligence as the time (on a freelance basis) and that this could be behind Britain's claim that a "separate intelligence agency" was the source of the Niger document.
Finally, Knight Ridder reports that, contrary to Italian denials last week, US officials say that SISMI did pass on "bogus allegations to the United States of an Iraqi effort to buy uranium ore from the African nation of Niger for a nuclear bomb program."
Four US officials said the Italian military intelligence agency known as SISMI passed three reports to the CIA station in Rome between October 2001 and March 2002 outlining an alleged deal for Iraq to buy uranium ore, known as yellowcake, from Niger. Yellowcake is refined into the uranium fuel that powers nuclear weapons. The US officials spoke on condition of anonymity because portions of the matter remain classified.
One of the reports passed by SISMI contained language that turned out to have been lifted verbatim from crudely forged documents that outlined the purported uranium-ore deal, the US officials said.
The Independent writes that some Italian media reports have accused General Pollari of working with a group of American neoconservatives to make sure the now discredited "Niger connection" made its way to the highest levels of the Bush administration.
Erasing the gray areas of prisoner abuse
After Abu Ghraib, Sen. John McCain rightly seeks to realign the US with
world standards. The Monitor's View
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1107/p08s01-comv.html?s=hns
After Abu Ghraib, Sen. John McCain rightly seeks to realign the US with
world standards. The Monitor's View
http://www.csmonitor.com/2005/1107/p08s01-comv.html?s=hns
Cheney Fights for Detainee Policy
By Dana Priest and Robin Wright
Over the past year, Vice President Cheney has waged an intense and largely unpublicized campaign to stop Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from imposing more restrictive rules on the handling of terrorist suspects, according to defense, state, intelligence and congressional officials.
Last winter, when Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, began pushing to have the full committee briefed on the CIA's interrogation practices, Cheney called him to the White House to urge that he drop the matter, said three U.S. officials.
In recent months, Cheney has been the force against adding safeguards to the Defense Department's rules on treatment of military prisoners, putting him at odds with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon R. England. On a trip to Canada last month, Rice interrupted a packed itinerary to hold a secure video-teleconference with Cheney on detainee policy to make sure no decisions were made without her input.
Just last week, Cheney showed up at a Republican senatorial luncheon to lobby lawmakers for a CIA exemption to an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The exemption would cover the CIA's covert "black sites" in several Eastern European democracies and other countries where key al Qaeda captives are being kept.
Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt declined to comment on the vice president's interventions or to elaborate on his positions. "The vice president's views are certainly reflected in the administration's policy," he said.
Increasingly, however, Cheney's positions are being opposed by other administration officials, including Cabinet members, political appointees and Republican lawmakers who once stood firmly behind the administration on all matters concerning terrorism.
Personnel changes in President Bush's second term have added to the isolation of Cheney, who previously had been able to prevail in part because other key parties to the debate -- including Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and White House counsel Harriet Miers -- continued to sit on the fence.
But in a reflection of how many within the administration now favor changing the rules, Elliot Abrams, traditionally one of the most hawkish voices in internal debates, is among the most persistent advocates of changing detainee policy in his role as the deputy national security adviser for democracy, according to officials familiar with his role.
At the same time Rice has emerged as an advocate for changing the rules to "get out of the detainee mess," said one senior U.S. official familiar with discussions. Her top advisers, along with their Pentagon counterparts, are working on a package of proposals designed to address all controversial detainee issues at once, instead of dealing with them on a piecemeal basis.
Cheney's camp is a "shrinking island," said one State Department official who, like other administration officials quoted in this article, asked not to be identified because public dissent is strongly discouraged by the White House.
A fundamental question lies at the heart of these disagreements: Four years into the fight, what is the most effective way to wage the campaign against terrorism?
Cheney's camp says the United States does not torture captives, but believes the president needs nearly unfettered power to deal with terrorists to protect Americans. To preserve the president's flexibility, any measure that might impose constraints should be resisted. That is why the administration has recoiled from embracing the language of treaties such as the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Cheney's aides find vague and open-ended.
On the other side of the debate are those who believe that unconventional measures -- harsh interrogation tactics, prisoner abuse and the "ghosting" and covert detention of CIA-held prisoners -- have so damaged world support for the U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign that they have hurt the U.S. cause. Also, they argue, these measures have tainted core American values such as human rights and the rule of law.
"The debate in the world has become about whether the U.S. complies with its legal obligations. We need to regain the moral high ground," said one senior administration official familiar with internal deliberations on the issue, adding that Rice believes current policy is "hurting the president's agenda and her agenda."
McCain's amendment would limit the military's interrogation and detention tactics to those described in the Army Field Manual, and it would prohibit all U.S. government employees from using cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Cheney pushed hard to have the entire amendment defeated. He twice held meetings with key lawmakers to lobby against the measure, once traveling to Capitol Hill in July, to button-hole Sens. John W. Warner (R-Va.), McCain and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).
When that tack did not work -- 90 senators supported the measure -- Cheney handed McCain language that would exempt the CIA. Despite Cheney's concerns, Graham said he has not heard any concerns from the CIA suggesting it needs an exemption from the McCain amendment. The CIA declined to comment.
"It shows that we have a philosophical difference here," said Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "The vice president believes in certain circumstances the government can't be bound by the language McCain is pushing. I believe that out of bounds of that language, we do harm to the U.S. image. It doesn't mean he's bad or I'm good; it just means we see it differently."
Cheney and the White House also oppose the language of a separate Defense Department directive, first reported by the New York Times, limiting detainee interrogations. The ongoing internal debate has stalled publication of the directive.
"This is the first issue we've gone to the trenches on," said a senior State Department official.
On the issue of the CIA's interrogation and detention practices, this spring Cheney requested the CIA brief him on the matter. "Cheney's strategy seems to be to stop the broader movement to get an independent commission on interrogation practices and the McCain amendment," said one intelligence official.
Beside personal pressure from the vice president, Cheney's staff is also engaged in resisting a policy change. Tactics included "trying to have meetings canceled ... to at least slow things down or gum up the works" or trying to conduct meetings on the subject without other key Cabinet members, one administration official said. The official said some internal memos and e-mail from the National Security Council staff to the national security adviser were automatically forwarded to the vice president's office -- in some cases without the knowledge of the authors.
For that reason, Rice "wanted to be in all meetings," said a senior State Department official.
Cheney's chief aide in this bureaucratic war of wills is David S. Addington, who was his chief counsel until last week when he replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the vice president's chief of staff.
Addington exerted influence on many of the most significant policy decisions after Sept. 11, 2001. He helped write the position on torture taken by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, a stance rescinded after it became public, and he helped pick Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the location beyond the reach of U.S. law for holding suspected terrorists.
When Addington learned that the draft Pentagon directive included language from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits torture and cruel treatment, including "humiliating and degrading treatment," he summoned the Pentagon official in charge of the detainee issue to brief him.
During a tense meeting at his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Addington was strident, said officials with knowledge of the encounter, and chastised Deputy Assistant Secretary Matthew C. Waxman for including what he regarded as vague and unhelpful language from Article 3 in the directive.
On Tuesday, Cheney, who often attends the GOP senators' weekly luncheons without addressing the lawmakers, made "an impassioned plea" to reject McCain's amendment, said a senatorial aide who was briefed on the meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of its closed nature. After Senate aides were ordered out of the Mansfield Room, just steps from the Senate chamber, Cheney said that aggressive interrogations of detainees such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed had yielded useful information, and that the option to treat prisoners harshly must not be taken from interrogators.
McCain then rebutted Cheney's comments, the aide said, telling his colleagues that the image of the United States using torture "is killing us around the world." At least one other senator, Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), supported Cheney, as he has in public, the aide said.
Staff writers Charles Babington and Josh White contributed to this report.
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By Dana Priest and Robin Wright
Over the past year, Vice President Cheney has waged an intense and largely unpublicized campaign to stop Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department from imposing more restrictive rules on the handling of terrorist suspects, according to defense, state, intelligence and congressional officials.
Last winter, when Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, began pushing to have the full committee briefed on the CIA's interrogation practices, Cheney called him to the White House to urge that he drop the matter, said three U.S. officials.
In recent months, Cheney has been the force against adding safeguards to the Defense Department's rules on treatment of military prisoners, putting him at odds with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and acting Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon R. England. On a trip to Canada last month, Rice interrupted a packed itinerary to hold a secure video-teleconference with Cheney on detainee policy to make sure no decisions were made without her input.
Just last week, Cheney showed up at a Republican senatorial luncheon to lobby lawmakers for a CIA exemption to an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The exemption would cover the CIA's covert "black sites" in several Eastern European democracies and other countries where key al Qaeda captives are being kept.
Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt declined to comment on the vice president's interventions or to elaborate on his positions. "The vice president's views are certainly reflected in the administration's policy," he said.
Increasingly, however, Cheney's positions are being opposed by other administration officials, including Cabinet members, political appointees and Republican lawmakers who once stood firmly behind the administration on all matters concerning terrorism.
Personnel changes in President Bush's second term have added to the isolation of Cheney, who previously had been able to prevail in part because other key parties to the debate -- including Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and White House counsel Harriet Miers -- continued to sit on the fence.
But in a reflection of how many within the administration now favor changing the rules, Elliot Abrams, traditionally one of the most hawkish voices in internal debates, is among the most persistent advocates of changing detainee policy in his role as the deputy national security adviser for democracy, according to officials familiar with his role.
At the same time Rice has emerged as an advocate for changing the rules to "get out of the detainee mess," said one senior U.S. official familiar with discussions. Her top advisers, along with their Pentagon counterparts, are working on a package of proposals designed to address all controversial detainee issues at once, instead of dealing with them on a piecemeal basis.
Cheney's camp is a "shrinking island," said one State Department official who, like other administration officials quoted in this article, asked not to be identified because public dissent is strongly discouraged by the White House.
A fundamental question lies at the heart of these disagreements: Four years into the fight, what is the most effective way to wage the campaign against terrorism?
Cheney's camp says the United States does not torture captives, but believes the president needs nearly unfettered power to deal with terrorists to protect Americans. To preserve the president's flexibility, any measure that might impose constraints should be resisted. That is why the administration has recoiled from embracing the language of treaties such as the U.N. Convention Against Torture, which Cheney's aides find vague and open-ended.
On the other side of the debate are those who believe that unconventional measures -- harsh interrogation tactics, prisoner abuse and the "ghosting" and covert detention of CIA-held prisoners -- have so damaged world support for the U.S.-led counterterrorism campaign that they have hurt the U.S. cause. Also, they argue, these measures have tainted core American values such as human rights and the rule of law.
"The debate in the world has become about whether the U.S. complies with its legal obligations. We need to regain the moral high ground," said one senior administration official familiar with internal deliberations on the issue, adding that Rice believes current policy is "hurting the president's agenda and her agenda."
McCain's amendment would limit the military's interrogation and detention tactics to those described in the Army Field Manual, and it would prohibit all U.S. government employees from using cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
Cheney pushed hard to have the entire amendment defeated. He twice held meetings with key lawmakers to lobby against the measure, once traveling to Capitol Hill in July, to button-hole Sens. John W. Warner (R-Va.), McCain and Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.).
When that tack did not work -- 90 senators supported the measure -- Cheney handed McCain language that would exempt the CIA. Despite Cheney's concerns, Graham said he has not heard any concerns from the CIA suggesting it needs an exemption from the McCain amendment. The CIA declined to comment.
"It shows that we have a philosophical difference here," said Graham, a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. "The vice president believes in certain circumstances the government can't be bound by the language McCain is pushing. I believe that out of bounds of that language, we do harm to the U.S. image. It doesn't mean he's bad or I'm good; it just means we see it differently."
Cheney and the White House also oppose the language of a separate Defense Department directive, first reported by the New York Times, limiting detainee interrogations. The ongoing internal debate has stalled publication of the directive.
"This is the first issue we've gone to the trenches on," said a senior State Department official.
On the issue of the CIA's interrogation and detention practices, this spring Cheney requested the CIA brief him on the matter. "Cheney's strategy seems to be to stop the broader movement to get an independent commission on interrogation practices and the McCain amendment," said one intelligence official.
Beside personal pressure from the vice president, Cheney's staff is also engaged in resisting a policy change. Tactics included "trying to have meetings canceled ... to at least slow things down or gum up the works" or trying to conduct meetings on the subject without other key Cabinet members, one administration official said. The official said some internal memos and e-mail from the National Security Council staff to the national security adviser were automatically forwarded to the vice president's office -- in some cases without the knowledge of the authors.
For that reason, Rice "wanted to be in all meetings," said a senior State Department official.
Cheney's chief aide in this bureaucratic war of wills is David S. Addington, who was his chief counsel until last week when he replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as the vice president's chief of staff.
Addington exerted influence on many of the most significant policy decisions after Sept. 11, 2001. He helped write the position on torture taken by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, a stance rescinded after it became public, and he helped pick Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as the location beyond the reach of U.S. law for holding suspected terrorists.
When Addington learned that the draft Pentagon directive included language from Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which prohibits torture and cruel treatment, including "humiliating and degrading treatment," he summoned the Pentagon official in charge of the detainee issue to brief him.
During a tense meeting at his office in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, Addington was strident, said officials with knowledge of the encounter, and chastised Deputy Assistant Secretary Matthew C. Waxman for including what he regarded as vague and unhelpful language from Article 3 in the directive.
On Tuesday, Cheney, who often attends the GOP senators' weekly luncheons without addressing the lawmakers, made "an impassioned plea" to reject McCain's amendment, said a senatorial aide who was briefed on the meeting and spoke on the condition of anonymity because of its closed nature. After Senate aides were ordered out of the Mansfield Room, just steps from the Senate chamber, Cheney said that aggressive interrogations of detainees such as Khalid Sheik Mohammed had yielded useful information, and that the option to treat prisoners harshly must not be taken from interrogators.
McCain then rebutted Cheney's comments, the aide said, telling his colleagues that the image of the United States using torture "is killing us around the world." At least one other senator, Ted Stevens (R-Alaska), supported Cheney, as he has in public, the aide said.
Staff writers Charles Babington and Josh White contributed to this report.
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Cheney wants torture and Cheney rules the world (via his puppet). That is what happens when people put forward men who have chickened out of the military, and twice dropped (or been chucked) out of college and they get beyond themselves. We call them 'little bumped-up nowts' in Britain. In fact, I think Britain invented 'kicking people upstairs' when they disgraced themselves.
Prisoner Accounts Suggest Detention At Secret Facilities
By Josh White
Three Yemeni nationals who were arrested in late 2003 say they were transferred to U.S. custody and kept isolated in at least four secret detention facilities that Amnesty International officials believe could be part of a covert CIA prison system.
The three detainees have not said they were physically abused while in U.S. custody, but they describe being whisked away in airplanes to unknown locations where they were interrogated by Americans in civilian clothes, according to an Amnesty International report. At one prison, the detainees were guarded by people in all-black "ninja" suits, who communicated using hand gestures.
During their separate incarcerations, the detainees were never visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross, never had access to lawyers, were unable to correspond with their families and had no contact with the outside world, the report said. Their families believed they were dead or were told that they had gone to Iraq to fight the United States.
The accounts, taken in independent interviews by Amnesty International researchers over the past few months, appear to be consistent with reports of a network of secret CIA detention facilities, according to the report. The detainees could not determine where they were because they were hooded during the flights, but because of the travel time they assumed they were in Europe or the Middle East, according to Amnesty International.
"We've tried working out where they might have been, but it's so subjective," said Anne FitzGerald, senior adviser on research policy for Amnesty International, who interviewed the detainees in two Yemeni prisons. "It's clear they were in facilities that were designed to hold many people, not just them. But they really didn't know where they were."
The CIA declined to comment Friday.
In a telephone interview from London last week, FitzGerald said she believes the detainees' stories are credible because they were each detained separately and were unable to communicate with one another before the United States turned them over to the Yemeni government in May. One of the detainees has never met the other two and is now kept in a separate facility, yet his story is consistent, she said.
Muhammad Assad was arrested in his home of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Dec. 26, 2003, for alleged passport problems. A Yemeni native, Assad had lived in Tanzania for 20 years.
After his arrest and initial questioning, Assad was taken to a waiting airplane, and his family was told that he was deported to Yemen, according to Amnesty International. Yemeni authorities denied that Assad had entered the country, and Tanzania later informed Assad's father that he had been turned over to U.S. officials.
Assad believes he was arrested because of his connections to a charity that was "blacklisted" after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks for allegedly funding terrorism. The al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity, had rented space in a building Assad owned. It is the only topic Assad was questioned about in his 15 months of incarceration.
He was first taken on a small airplane that flew for about two to three hours, and was interrogated for two weeks by Arabic-speaking people, according to the report. He was then flown elsewhere, a flight that he believes lasted about 11 hours, with a one-hour stop-over. When he arrived, his surroundings were much colder, and he was interrogated by white men who spoke what he believed to be American English.
"There was nothing haphazard or makeshift about the detention regime, it was carefully designed to induce maximum disorientation, dependence and stress in the detainees," according to the 20-page report. "The men were subjected to extreme sensory deprivation; for over a year they did not know what country they were in, whether it was night or day, whether it was raining or sunny. They spoke to no one but their interrogators, through translators, and no one spoke to them."
Salah Ali and Muhammad Bashmilah, who were living in Indonesia, were arrested in August and October 2003, respectively; Ali in Jakarta and Bashmilah in Amman, Jordan. They were taken to a Jordanian prison and tortured -- badly beaten and chained in uncomfortable positions -- by Jordanian authorities before being transferred to U.S. custody, according to Amnesty International. Both men had traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 to learn about jihad, but neither man fought against the United States, according to FitzGerald.
Ali said he was stripped and beaten with sticks by a ring of masked soldiers. "They tried to force me to walk like an animal, on my hands and feet, and I refused," Ali told Amnesty, "so they stretched me out on the floor and walked on me and put their shoes in my mouth."
Ali and Bashmilah recount similar stories after their transfer to U.S. custody in a place Amnesty International believes could have been Eastern Europe. They were put into a windowless, underground facility, each was isolated in a tiny cell, and their jailers and interrogators spoke English with American accents. In April 2004, they were moved to a new facility with "no pictures or ornaments on the walls, no floor coverings, no windows, no natural light," according to the report. It was here that the guards dressed in all black.
FitzGerald said that the two Indonesian detainees were barely interrogated after their first few weeks, perhaps an acknowledgment that they did not know much. All three were released to Yemeni authorities in May. Ali and Bashmilah are in the central prison in Aden, and Assad is at a security prison at Al Ghaydah. Their families now know they are alive, FitzGerald said.
"The cases of the three 'disappeared' Yemenis documented in this report . . . suggest that the network of clandestine interrogation centres is not reserved solely for high-value detainees, but may be larger, more comprehensive and better organized than previously suspected," the report says.
Such "incommunicado" detentions are against international standards but are consistent with recent reports of how the CIA operated its detention network.
Manfred Nowak, the U.N. rapporteur on torture, said in an interview last week that secret facilities are a particularly important issue because there is no outside oversight and no ability to know which detainees are in custody or where they are held. He condemned the practice.
"Incommunicado detention forms inhumane treatment in and of itself," Nowak said.
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By Josh White
Three Yemeni nationals who were arrested in late 2003 say they were transferred to U.S. custody and kept isolated in at least four secret detention facilities that Amnesty International officials believe could be part of a covert CIA prison system.
The three detainees have not said they were physically abused while in U.S. custody, but they describe being whisked away in airplanes to unknown locations where they were interrogated by Americans in civilian clothes, according to an Amnesty International report. At one prison, the detainees were guarded by people in all-black "ninja" suits, who communicated using hand gestures.
During their separate incarcerations, the detainees were never visited by the International Committee of the Red Cross, never had access to lawyers, were unable to correspond with their families and had no contact with the outside world, the report said. Their families believed they were dead or were told that they had gone to Iraq to fight the United States.
The accounts, taken in independent interviews by Amnesty International researchers over the past few months, appear to be consistent with reports of a network of secret CIA detention facilities, according to the report. The detainees could not determine where they were because they were hooded during the flights, but because of the travel time they assumed they were in Europe or the Middle East, according to Amnesty International.
"We've tried working out where they might have been, but it's so subjective," said Anne FitzGerald, senior adviser on research policy for Amnesty International, who interviewed the detainees in two Yemeni prisons. "It's clear they were in facilities that were designed to hold many people, not just them. But they really didn't know where they were."
The CIA declined to comment Friday.
In a telephone interview from London last week, FitzGerald said she believes the detainees' stories are credible because they were each detained separately and were unable to communicate with one another before the United States turned them over to the Yemeni government in May. One of the detainees has never met the other two and is now kept in a separate facility, yet his story is consistent, she said.
Muhammad Assad was arrested in his home of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, on Dec. 26, 2003, for alleged passport problems. A Yemeni native, Assad had lived in Tanzania for 20 years.
After his arrest and initial questioning, Assad was taken to a waiting airplane, and his family was told that he was deported to Yemen, according to Amnesty International. Yemeni authorities denied that Assad had entered the country, and Tanzania later informed Assad's father that he had been turned over to U.S. officials.
Assad believes he was arrested because of his connections to a charity that was "blacklisted" after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks for allegedly funding terrorism. The al Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi Arabian charity, had rented space in a building Assad owned. It is the only topic Assad was questioned about in his 15 months of incarceration.
He was first taken on a small airplane that flew for about two to three hours, and was interrogated for two weeks by Arabic-speaking people, according to the report. He was then flown elsewhere, a flight that he believes lasted about 11 hours, with a one-hour stop-over. When he arrived, his surroundings were much colder, and he was interrogated by white men who spoke what he believed to be American English.
"There was nothing haphazard or makeshift about the detention regime, it was carefully designed to induce maximum disorientation, dependence and stress in the detainees," according to the 20-page report. "The men were subjected to extreme sensory deprivation; for over a year they did not know what country they were in, whether it was night or day, whether it was raining or sunny. They spoke to no one but their interrogators, through translators, and no one spoke to them."
Salah Ali and Muhammad Bashmilah, who were living in Indonesia, were arrested in August and October 2003, respectively; Ali in Jakarta and Bashmilah in Amman, Jordan. They were taken to a Jordanian prison and tortured -- badly beaten and chained in uncomfortable positions -- by Jordanian authorities before being transferred to U.S. custody, according to Amnesty International. Both men had traveled to Afghanistan in 2000 to learn about jihad, but neither man fought against the United States, according to FitzGerald.
Ali said he was stripped and beaten with sticks by a ring of masked soldiers. "They tried to force me to walk like an animal, on my hands and feet, and I refused," Ali told Amnesty, "so they stretched me out on the floor and walked on me and put their shoes in my mouth."
Ali and Bashmilah recount similar stories after their transfer to U.S. custody in a place Amnesty International believes could have been Eastern Europe. They were put into a windowless, underground facility, each was isolated in a tiny cell, and their jailers and interrogators spoke English with American accents. In April 2004, they were moved to a new facility with "no pictures or ornaments on the walls, no floor coverings, no windows, no natural light," according to the report. It was here that the guards dressed in all black.
FitzGerald said that the two Indonesian detainees were barely interrogated after their first few weeks, perhaps an acknowledgment that they did not know much. All three were released to Yemeni authorities in May. Ali and Bashmilah are in the central prison in Aden, and Assad is at a security prison at Al Ghaydah. Their families now know they are alive, FitzGerald said.
"The cases of the three 'disappeared' Yemenis documented in this report . . . suggest that the network of clandestine interrogation centres is not reserved solely for high-value detainees, but may be larger, more comprehensive and better organized than previously suspected," the report says.
Such "incommunicado" detentions are against international standards but are consistent with recent reports of how the CIA operated its detention network.
Manfred Nowak, the U.N. rapporteur on torture, said in an interview last week that secret facilities are a particularly important issue because there is no outside oversight and no ability to know which detainees are in custody or where they are held. He condemned the practice.
"Incommunicado detention forms inhumane treatment in and of itself," Nowak said.
Would you like to send this article to a friend? Go to
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/e...er=emailarticle
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2089-1859288,00.html
The Sunday Times November 06, 2005
‘Gulag’ leak from CIA men
Tony Allen-Mills
EASTERN European countries were yesterday scrambling to distance themselves from the CIA as officials in Washington searched for the source of an embarrassing leak that exposed a programme of secret jails for terrorist detainees.
Claims that the CIA has been hiding prominent Al-Qaeda members at a so-called “black site” facility in eastern Europe have prompted angry denials from Romania, Poland and Albania.
As details emerged yesterday of CIA flights to remote military airfields in northeast Poland and southeast Romania, George W Bush’s administration ordered an internal inquiry into how classified data was leaked to The Washington Post and Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group.
Senior intelligence sources blamed the leak on CIA officers unhappy at having to maintain what one former counter-terrorism official described as “secret gulags”.
The prisons are believed to hold at least 30 Al-Qaeda leaders labelled “ghost detainees” by Human Rights Watch. Many no longer have any intelligence value, but the CIA has been ordered to shield them from international scrutiny or legal proceedings.
The publication of flight logs detailing CIA movements has focused attention on a former military base at Szczytno-Szymany in Poland.
Polish officials acknowledged that a Boeing 737 carrying seven Americans landed at the base in September 2003 and took five others on board. The plane continued to the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base in Romania, then to the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba.
Poland and Romania said the plane’s stops had nothing to do with prisoner transfers. Other sources said Albania or Macedonia might have co-operated with the CIA.
The Sunday Times November 06, 2005
‘Gulag’ leak from CIA men
Tony Allen-Mills
EASTERN European countries were yesterday scrambling to distance themselves from the CIA as officials in Washington searched for the source of an embarrassing leak that exposed a programme of secret jails for terrorist detainees.
Claims that the CIA has been hiding prominent Al-Qaeda members at a so-called “black site” facility in eastern Europe have prompted angry denials from Romania, Poland and Albania.
As details emerged yesterday of CIA flights to remote military airfields in northeast Poland and southeast Romania, George W Bush’s administration ordered an internal inquiry into how classified data was leaked to The Washington Post and Human Rights Watch, a New York-based group.
Senior intelligence sources blamed the leak on CIA officers unhappy at having to maintain what one former counter-terrorism official described as “secret gulags”.
The prisons are believed to hold at least 30 Al-Qaeda leaders labelled “ghost detainees” by Human Rights Watch. Many no longer have any intelligence value, but the CIA has been ordered to shield them from international scrutiny or legal proceedings.
The publication of flight logs detailing CIA movements has focused attention on a former military base at Szczytno-Szymany in Poland.
Polish officials acknowledged that a Boeing 737 carrying seven Americans landed at the base in September 2003 and took five others on board. The plane continued to the Mihail Kogalniceanu air base in Romania, then to the US base in Guantanamo, Cuba.
Poland and Romania said the plane’s stops had nothing to do with prisoner transfers. Other sources said Albania or Macedonia might have co-operated with the CIA.
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/110...-torture05.html
McCain vows to add torture ban to all major Senate legislation
John Hendren
Los Angeles Times
Nov. 5, 2005 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - Girding for a potential fight with the Bush administration, supporters of a ban on torturing prisoners of war by U.S. interrogators threatened Friday to include the prohibition in nearly every bill the Senate considers until it becomes law.
The no-torture wording, which proponents say is supported by majorities in both houses of Congress, was included last month in the Senate's version of a defense spending bill. The measure's final form is being negotiated with the House, and the White House is pushing for either a rewording or deletion of the torture ban.
On Friday, at the urging of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, the Senate by a voice vote added the ban to a related defense bill as a backup. advertisement
Speaking from the Senate floor, McCain said, "If necessary - and I sincerely hope it is not - I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails. Let no one doubt our determination."
The ban would establish the Army Field Manual as the guiding authority in interrogations and prohibit "cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment" of prisoners.
The Bush administration has sought to exempt the CIA from the ban.
McCain's stature in the fight is enhanced because he was tortured while he was a prisoner during the Vietnam War. When the Senate voted to include the ban in the defense spending bill last month, it was approved 90-9.
The House's version of the spending bill does not contain the torture ban. But Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee, earlier this week urged his colleagues to accept the Senate provision.
The provision would reverse the Bush administration's contention that conditions placed on the treatment of prisoners of war in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other international treaties signed by the United States do not apply to foreigners held overseas.
The prisoners "can, apparently, be treated inhumanely," McCain said. "This means that America is the only country in the world that asserts a legal right to engage in cruel and inhumane treatment."
Bush initially threatened to veto the "must-pass" spending bill for the Pentagon if it contained the Senate provision. Later, he sought simply to exempt the CIA from the ban. McCain called that proposal "totally unacceptable."
Opponents of the McCain language contend that setting no-torture ground rules would signal to prisoners that they have little to fear during interrogations, discouraging them from providing information.
Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita had said Thursday that prisoners captured during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "know what we do by virtue of interrogation manuals and procedures, And they are trained to resist."
"So there's a perception that the kind of rigidity that comes with these kinds of amendments could restrict the president's flexibility in the global war on terror," DiRita said. "And anything that restricts our ability to engage this highly agile adversary is not desirable."
McCain vows to add torture ban to all major Senate legislation
John Hendren
Los Angeles Times
Nov. 5, 2005 12:00 AM
WASHINGTON - Girding for a potential fight with the Bush administration, supporters of a ban on torturing prisoners of war by U.S. interrogators threatened Friday to include the prohibition in nearly every bill the Senate considers until it becomes law.
The no-torture wording, which proponents say is supported by majorities in both houses of Congress, was included last month in the Senate's version of a defense spending bill. The measure's final form is being negotiated with the House, and the White House is pushing for either a rewording or deletion of the torture ban.
On Friday, at the urging of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz, the Senate by a voice vote added the ban to a related defense bill as a backup. advertisement
Speaking from the Senate floor, McCain said, "If necessary - and I sincerely hope it is not - I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails. Let no one doubt our determination."
The ban would establish the Army Field Manual as the guiding authority in interrogations and prohibit "cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment" of prisoners.
The Bush administration has sought to exempt the CIA from the ban.
McCain's stature in the fight is enhanced because he was tortured while he was a prisoner during the Vietnam War. When the Senate voted to include the ban in the defense spending bill last month, it was approved 90-9.
The House's version of the spending bill does not contain the torture ban. But Rep. John Murtha of Pennsylvania, the ranking Democrat on the House Defense Appropriations subcommittee, earlier this week urged his colleagues to accept the Senate provision.
The provision would reverse the Bush administration's contention that conditions placed on the treatment of prisoners of war in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and other international treaties signed by the United States do not apply to foreigners held overseas.
The prisoners "can, apparently, be treated inhumanely," McCain said. "This means that America is the only country in the world that asserts a legal right to engage in cruel and inhumane treatment."
Bush initially threatened to veto the "must-pass" spending bill for the Pentagon if it contained the Senate provision. Later, he sought simply to exempt the CIA from the ban. McCain called that proposal "totally unacceptable."
Opponents of the McCain language contend that setting no-torture ground rules would signal to prisoners that they have little to fear during interrogations, discouraging them from providing information.
Pentagon spokesman Larry DiRita had said Thursday that prisoners captured during the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq "know what we do by virtue of interrogation manuals and procedures, And they are trained to resist."
"So there's a perception that the kind of rigidity that comes with these kinds of amendments could restrict the president's flexibility in the global war on terror," DiRita said. "And anything that restricts our ability to engage this highly agile adversary is not desirable."
In the Name of Democracy
American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond
By Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler and Brendan Smith
The possibility that high U.S. officials may be guilty of war crimes and may be preparing to commit more raises questions that few Americans have yet faced. These questions go far beyond technical legal matters to the broadest concerns of international security, democratic government, morality, and personal responsibility.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10905.htm
American War Crimes in Iraq and Beyond
By Jeremy Brecher, Jill Cutler and Brendan Smith
The possibility that high U.S. officials may be guilty of war crimes and may be preparing to commit more raises questions that few Americans have yet faced. These questions go far beyond technical legal matters to the broadest concerns of international security, democratic government, morality, and personal responsibility.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10905.htm
A Deadly Interrogation
Can the C.I.A. legally kill a prisoner?
By JANE MAYER
Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,” meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10904.htm
Can the C.I.A. legally kill a prisoner?
By JANE MAYER
Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,” meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10904.htm
Torture: It's the new American way
By Rosa Brooks
During the Cold War, we thought we knew what distinguished us from our Soviet bloc enemies. We did not have a gulag; we did not imprison and torture our enemies. But the war on terror has distorted our national values. We have used some of the same tactics we once decried. The Soviet Union's legacy of terror lives on, its tactics embraced by some of our leaders.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10900.htm
By Rosa Brooks
During the Cold War, we thought we knew what distinguished us from our Soviet bloc enemies. We did not have a gulag; we did not imprison and torture our enemies. But the war on terror has distorted our national values. We have used some of the same tactics we once decried. The Soviet Union's legacy of terror lives on, its tactics embraced by some of our leaders.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10900.htm
Outing Secret Jails:
Counterterrorism sources have confirmed to TIME that the CIA has had covert detention centers in Thailand and Guantanamo Bay, which are no longer operating, and that the agency continues to run similar facilities in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10899.htm
Counterterrorism sources have confirmed to TIME that the CIA has had covert detention centers in Thailand and Guantanamo Bay, which are no longer operating, and that the agency continues to run similar facilities in Afghanistan and Eastern Europe.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10899.htm
Prisoner Accounts Suggest Detention At Secret Facilities:
Three Yemeni nationals who were arrested in late 2003 say they were transferred to U.S. custody and kept isolated in at least four secret detention facilities that Amnesty International officials believe could be part of a covert CIA prison system.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10903.htm
Three Yemeni nationals who were arrested in late 2003 say they were transferred to U.S. custody and kept isolated in at least four secret detention facilities that Amnesty International officials believe could be part of a covert CIA prison system.
http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article10903.htm
I usually disagree with this columnist but not this time.
Torture, Shaming Us All
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 8, 2005; A19
PETRA, Jordan -- Somewhere north of here, Bassam and I switched roles. He pulled the car over and I took over the driving. The idea was to keep talking, to fight the painful monotony of the desert road, and so we talked of family -- Bassam has four children -- and of the economic situation, his time in Kuwait and finally, because I had been avoiding the subject, what he thought of America and Americans. This is how Abu Ghraib came up.
I did not mention the prison near Baghdad where Iraqi prisoners were abused. Nor did I mention Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States keeps detainees -- forever and ever, it seems. These were places that Bassam brought up. He was, it was plain to see, confounded and disgusted by America.
You have to know something about Bassam. He is not partial to Iraqis. For 30 years he lived in Kuwait. He built an engineering business there -- something to do with oil wells and power. He had employees and an office and vehicles. When the Iraqis invaded in 1990, they vandalized his business. They stole his cars. They wrecked everything he built. Eventually he returned to Jordan, where he had been born. He is now a driver.
Bassam's English is pretty good. He had no trouble distinguishing between Americans and their government. The former he liked, the latter he did not. It all had to do with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, these places of abuse and alleged torture. Here his English started to fail him. The degradation of Muslims -- not Iraqis, mind you, but Muslims -- appalled him. He started to say why, but he could not. I kept my eyes on the road as he fumbled for the right words. "We are Muslims," he said haltingly. I looked over. He was visibly upset.
So was I. I have traveled this region for years and always I kept my head high as an American. There are things we do not do. There are things we stand for. Go ahead, hate us for supporting Israel or for some similar reason, but if you were Bassam -- any Bassam anywhere in the world -- you had to know that America did not abuse prisoners and most especially did not torture them. Other governments did that. Not us. The culprits at Abu Ghraib were punished.
Now, though, we are witnessing a debate in Washington that any American at one time would have thought impossible: whether to allow "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control of the United States government." The words are taken from the amendment introduced by Sen. John McCain, which would prohibit such practices. It has passed twice, the first time by 90 to 9, the second by a voice vote. It has the support of a former POW, McCain; a former Navy secretary, John Warner; a Reserve military judge, Lindsey Graham -- and, outside the Senate, former military men such as Colin Powell. Nonetheless, the administration vows a veto.
The Bush administration's effort is being led by Vice President Cheney, who -- give him credit -- is indomitably shameless. Given the ridiculous things he said in the run-up to the war, you'd have thought the man would have sought the contemplative life and retreated to some swell retirement community. But he not only perseveres, he has become the unashamed lobbyist for torture. He must have a reason. Apparently it is this: Sometimes ya gotta play rough.
Maybe so. But all the time -- day in and day out -- the military and the CIA and all branches of government are entitled to clear rules about what is and is not allowed. The Abu Ghraib idiots sure didn't seem to know the rules, and neither did anyone around them. Moreover, as McCain and others keep saying, the only way you can reasonably expect an enemy to be decent to American POWs is if we are decent to them.
The practical advantages of banning torture are persuasive -- and a needed reassertion of U.S. principles. Merely doing so, however, is not likely to convince people throughout the world that rhetoric is now actual policy. After all, lots of countries routinely torture prisoners; none that I know of admits to the practice.
But if the day ever comes when George Bush shames us all by vetoing a ban on "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment," then I will, if I should be taking this drive to Petra again, keep my eyes firmly on the road. I could still look at Bassam. But I wouldn't want him to look at me.
cohenr@washpost.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/internat...agewanted=print
Torture, Shaming Us All
By Richard Cohen
Tuesday, November 8, 2005; A19
PETRA, Jordan -- Somewhere north of here, Bassam and I switched roles. He pulled the car over and I took over the driving. The idea was to keep talking, to fight the painful monotony of the desert road, and so we talked of family -- Bassam has four children -- and of the economic situation, his time in Kuwait and finally, because I had been avoiding the subject, what he thought of America and Americans. This is how Abu Ghraib came up.
I did not mention the prison near Baghdad where Iraqi prisoners were abused. Nor did I mention Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where the United States keeps detainees -- forever and ever, it seems. These were places that Bassam brought up. He was, it was plain to see, confounded and disgusted by America.
You have to know something about Bassam. He is not partial to Iraqis. For 30 years he lived in Kuwait. He built an engineering business there -- something to do with oil wells and power. He had employees and an office and vehicles. When the Iraqis invaded in 1990, they vandalized his business. They stole his cars. They wrecked everything he built. Eventually he returned to Jordan, where he had been born. He is now a driver.
Bassam's English is pretty good. He had no trouble distinguishing between Americans and their government. The former he liked, the latter he did not. It all had to do with Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, these places of abuse and alleged torture. Here his English started to fail him. The degradation of Muslims -- not Iraqis, mind you, but Muslims -- appalled him. He started to say why, but he could not. I kept my eyes on the road as he fumbled for the right words. "We are Muslims," he said haltingly. I looked over. He was visibly upset.
So was I. I have traveled this region for years and always I kept my head high as an American. There are things we do not do. There are things we stand for. Go ahead, hate us for supporting Israel or for some similar reason, but if you were Bassam -- any Bassam anywhere in the world -- you had to know that America did not abuse prisoners and most especially did not torture them. Other governments did that. Not us. The culprits at Abu Ghraib were punished.
Now, though, we are witnessing a debate in Washington that any American at one time would have thought impossible: whether to allow "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment of persons under custody or control of the United States government." The words are taken from the amendment introduced by Sen. John McCain, which would prohibit such practices. It has passed twice, the first time by 90 to 9, the second by a voice vote. It has the support of a former POW, McCain; a former Navy secretary, John Warner; a Reserve military judge, Lindsey Graham -- and, outside the Senate, former military men such as Colin Powell. Nonetheless, the administration vows a veto.
The Bush administration's effort is being led by Vice President Cheney, who -- give him credit -- is indomitably shameless. Given the ridiculous things he said in the run-up to the war, you'd have thought the man would have sought the contemplative life and retreated to some swell retirement community. But he not only perseveres, he has become the unashamed lobbyist for torture. He must have a reason. Apparently it is this: Sometimes ya gotta play rough.
Maybe so. But all the time -- day in and day out -- the military and the CIA and all branches of government are entitled to clear rules about what is and is not allowed. The Abu Ghraib idiots sure didn't seem to know the rules, and neither did anyone around them. Moreover, as McCain and others keep saying, the only way you can reasonably expect an enemy to be decent to American POWs is if we are decent to them.
The practical advantages of banning torture are persuasive -- and a needed reassertion of U.S. principles. Merely doing so, however, is not likely to convince people throughout the world that rhetoric is now actual policy. After all, lots of countries routinely torture prisoners; none that I know of admits to the practice.
But if the day ever comes when George Bush shames us all by vetoing a ban on "cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment," then I will, if I should be taking this drive to Petra again, keep my eyes firmly on the road. I could still look at Bassam. But I wouldn't want him to look at me.
cohenr@washpost.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/internat...agewanted=print
Intelligence czar silent on torture bill
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte reportedly has opted out of the Bush administration's effort to exempt the CIA from an anti-torture bill.
Time magazine reported that Negroponte dodged the issue during a meeting last month with senators.
"It's above my pay grade," he said.
Negroponte also declined to answer senators questions on whether torture could ever produce useful information.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., attached an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would make the Geneva Convention ban on mistreatment of prisoners part of U.S. law. President Bush has threatened to veto the bill unless the CIA is exempted, and Vice President Dick Cheney heads up the administration lobbying effort against it.
The debate on treatment of suspected terrorists has become more pointed. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear an appeal of the use of military tribunals. There have also been reports that a few high-level al-Qaida leaders are being kept at former Soviet installations in eastern Europe
http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopN...-negroponte.xml
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 (UPI) -- U.S. intelligence czar John Negroponte reportedly has opted out of the Bush administration's effort to exempt the CIA from an anti-torture bill.
Time magazine reported that Negroponte dodged the issue during a meeting last month with senators.
"It's above my pay grade," he said.
Negroponte also declined to answer senators questions on whether torture could ever produce useful information.
Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., attached an amendment to the defense authorization bill that would make the Geneva Convention ban on mistreatment of prisoners part of U.S. law. President Bush has threatened to veto the bill unless the CIA is exempted, and Vice President Dick Cheney heads up the administration lobbying effort against it.
The debate on treatment of suspected terrorists has become more pointed. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced it would hear an appeal of the use of military tribunals. There have also been reports that a few high-level al-Qaida leaders are being kept at former Soviet installations in eastern Europe
http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/?feed=TopN...-negroponte.xml
Posted on Mon, Nov. 07, 2005
Bush administration's torture policy increasingly under fire
BY WARREN P. STROBEL AND JAMES KUHNHENN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Nineteen months after the first revelations of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, the Bush administration's position on treating detainees is increasingly under fire.
With Vice President Dick Cheney in the lead, the White House has fought a vigorous campaign - much of it behind the scenes - to reject limits on how to treat prisoners who might have information on terrorist plots.
But a growing number of lawmakers, both moderate Republicans and Democrats, argue that abuse of prisoners is immoral, has devastated the United States' image and ability to project its values overseas, and would endanger captured American soldiers or civilians.
There also are growing qualms at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's State Department and within the uniformed military over spreading disclosures of detainee abuse by U.S. personnel and the global criticism the United States is taking.
Finally, intelligence and military officers argue that abuse and torture are likely to produce bogus intelligence because prisoners will say whatever they think their interrogators want to hear to stop the abuse.
For example, said one U.S. intelligence official, al-Qaida training camp commander Ibn Sheikh al-Libi gave his interrogators bogus information about links between Iraq and al-Qaida after the CIA turned him over to Egyptian authorities for questioning. "The Egyptians aren't known for their gentle treatment of terrorists," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is classified.
With the debate raging, President Bush weighed in Monday firmly on the side of his vice president.
While saying "we do not torture," Bush told a news conference in Panama: "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people.
"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again, and so you bet, we'll aggressively pursue them, but we will do so under the law," the president said.
Bush has threatened to veto a measure sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would prohibit cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees. The measure, which was attached to a defense spending bill, passed the Senate 90-9.
McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, argued that abuse of detainees harms the United States rather than helps in fighting terrorism.
"Subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop," McCain said. "Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy. ... And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas because inevitably these abuses become public."
The intensifying struggle over the policy has been fueled in part by continued revelations of abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, and reports last week by The Washington Post of a secret CIA prison system for terrorism suspects established after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In the latest incident, the U.S. military said Monday that five soldiers from the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment were charged Saturday with abusing detainees two months ago. The soldiers allegedly punched and kicked three detainees as they were being transported on Sept. 7.
"It's become clear that Abu Ghraib wasn't a one-off kind of situation," said Curt Goering, the deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA.
The system that allowed prisoners to be abused "was far more comprehensive and widespread than first understood," Goering said. "The measures taken so far by the (U.S.) government haven't been at all sufficient."
Cheney lobbied vigorously to stop McCain's measure from being passed. He brought CIA Director Porter Goss with him to Capitol Hill recently to argue for an exemption for U.S. intelligence personnel.
Cheney "views those conversations as private," said his spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride.
Last week, Cheney chose his counsel David Addington as his new chief of staff. Addington, who's replacing the indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, helped shape a 2002 Justice Department memo arguing that torture might be justified in some cases.
There are signs, though, that Cheney's position is losing ground.
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to review a constitutional challenge to Bush's military tribunals for foreign terrorism suspects.
The U.S. government recently invited United Nations envoys to tour the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The envoys turned down the offer because they were refused permission to interview detainees.
Some Republicans are increasingly vocal in opposing the White House position.
"I think the administration is making a terrible mistake in opposing John McCain's amendment on detainees and torture. Why in the world they're doing that, I don't know. You've got 90 senators out of 100, and that includes many Republicans, opposed to (torture)," Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
The House of Representatives' versions of Pentagon spending and policy legislation, however, don't contain McCain's language, even though a majority in the House appears to support it.
At least 15 Republicans have written a letter meant for the House-Senate negotiators, urging that McCain's language be retained. So far House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., hasn't named House conferees, delaying negotiations.
"It's not in our best interest to have any doubt about where we in the United States stand," said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., one of the letter signers and chairman of a House panel on terrorism. "My Republican conference, that overwhelmingly supports the war in Iraq, must send a clear message that we do not tolerate torture."
Republican House leaders appear to be holding up the Pentagon spending bill so that they can attach an across-the board spending cut to it. As the only remaining must-pass bill before Congress recesses for the year, the bill is an attractive vehicle for controversial legislation.
McCain said he would "not relieve pressure" on the defense spending bill. He said he would attach his provision to any legislation that comes before the Senate until it is adopted.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...cs/13106865.htm
Bush administration's torture policy increasingly under fire
BY WARREN P. STROBEL AND JAMES KUHNHENN
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - Nineteen months after the first revelations of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, the Bush administration's position on treating detainees is increasingly under fire.
With Vice President Dick Cheney in the lead, the White House has fought a vigorous campaign - much of it behind the scenes - to reject limits on how to treat prisoners who might have information on terrorist plots.
But a growing number of lawmakers, both moderate Republicans and Democrats, argue that abuse of prisoners is immoral, has devastated the United States' image and ability to project its values overseas, and would endanger captured American soldiers or civilians.
There also are growing qualms at Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's State Department and within the uniformed military over spreading disclosures of detainee abuse by U.S. personnel and the global criticism the United States is taking.
Finally, intelligence and military officers argue that abuse and torture are likely to produce bogus intelligence because prisoners will say whatever they think their interrogators want to hear to stop the abuse.
For example, said one U.S. intelligence official, al-Qaida training camp commander Ibn Sheikh al-Libi gave his interrogators bogus information about links between Iraq and al-Qaida after the CIA turned him over to Egyptian authorities for questioning. "The Egyptians aren't known for their gentle treatment of terrorists," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is classified.
With the debate raging, President Bush weighed in Monday firmly on the side of his vice president.
While saying "we do not torture," Bush told a news conference in Panama: "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people.
"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again, and so you bet, we'll aggressively pursue them, but we will do so under the law," the president said.
Bush has threatened to veto a measure sponsored by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would prohibit cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment of detainees. The measure, which was attached to a defense spending bill, passed the Senate 90-9.
McCain, who was tortured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, argued that abuse of detainees harms the United States rather than helps in fighting terrorism.
"Subjecting prisoners to abuse leads to bad intelligence because under torture a detainee will tell his interrogator anything to make the pain stop," McCain said. "Second, mistreatment of our prisoners endangers U.S. troops who might be captured by the enemy. ... And third, prisoner abuses exact on us a terrible toll in the war of ideas because inevitably these abuses become public."
The intensifying struggle over the policy has been fueled in part by continued revelations of abuse of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan, and reports last week by The Washington Post of a secret CIA prison system for terrorism suspects established after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
In the latest incident, the U.S. military said Monday that five soldiers from the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment were charged Saturday with abusing detainees two months ago. The soldiers allegedly punched and kicked three detainees as they were being transported on Sept. 7.
"It's become clear that Abu Ghraib wasn't a one-off kind of situation," said Curt Goering, the deputy executive director of Amnesty International USA.
The system that allowed prisoners to be abused "was far more comprehensive and widespread than first understood," Goering said. "The measures taken so far by the (U.S.) government haven't been at all sufficient."
Cheney lobbied vigorously to stop McCain's measure from being passed. He brought CIA Director Porter Goss with him to Capitol Hill recently to argue for an exemption for U.S. intelligence personnel.
Cheney "views those conversations as private," said his spokeswoman, Lea Anne McBride.
Last week, Cheney chose his counsel David Addington as his new chief of staff. Addington, who's replacing the indicted I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby, helped shape a 2002 Justice Department memo arguing that torture might be justified in some cases.
There are signs, though, that Cheney's position is losing ground.
The Supreme Court agreed Monday to review a constitutional challenge to Bush's military tribunals for foreign terrorism suspects.
The U.S. government recently invited United Nations envoys to tour the prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The envoys turned down the offer because they were refused permission to interview detainees.
Some Republicans are increasingly vocal in opposing the White House position.
"I think the administration is making a terrible mistake in opposing John McCain's amendment on detainees and torture. Why in the world they're doing that, I don't know. You've got 90 senators out of 100, and that includes many Republicans, opposed to (torture)," Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said Sunday on ABC's "This Week."
The House of Representatives' versions of Pentagon spending and policy legislation, however, don't contain McCain's language, even though a majority in the House appears to support it.
At least 15 Republicans have written a letter meant for the House-Senate negotiators, urging that McCain's language be retained. So far House Speaker Dennis Hastert, R-Ill., hasn't named House conferees, delaying negotiations.
"It's not in our best interest to have any doubt about where we in the United States stand," said Rep. Christopher Shays, R-Conn., one of the letter signers and chairman of a House panel on terrorism. "My Republican conference, that overwhelmingly supports the war in Iraq, must send a clear message that we do not tolerate torture."
Republican House leaders appear to be holding up the Pentagon spending bill so that they can attach an across-the board spending cut to it. As the only remaining must-pass bill before Congress recesses for the year, the bill is an attractive vehicle for controversial legislation.
McCain said he would "not relieve pressure" on the defense spending bill. He said he would attach his provision to any legislation that comes before the Senate until it is adopted.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...cs/13106865.htm
End torture evasion
Palm Beach Post Editorial
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
"We do not torture," President Bush repeated on Monday. Then why is his administration seeking an exemption for the CIA from a torture ban the Senate passed over White House objections?
The classic defense of torture is the need to forcibly extract information from a co-conspirator to prevent an imminent attack on innocent victims. Because torture, once condoned in any form, is so hard to control, most nations have enacted laws and signed treaties pledging not to cross that line. Torture ends up being used against innocent people for purposes of revenge or sadism. The "information" extracted under torture proves unreliable — people will say or admit anything to stop the pain.
In many countries, military officials in particular favor a clear ban on torture because they don't want it practiced against their own troops, should they be captured. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a prisoner of war during Vietnam, is primary sponsor of the anti-torture legislation. The Bush administration's request for a CIA exemption raises new questions because The Washington Post last week reported that after 9/11, the agency established and still maintains secret prisons in Eastern Europe to hold detainees thought to be members of Al-Qaeda. The Post complied with requests by U.S. officials not to divulge the exact locations. The prisoners are held without rights, an arrangement that would be impossible if they were imprisoned on U.S. soil.
Documented abuse at Abu ######Ghraib prison in Iraq and at a prison facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have cast serious doubt on the Bush administration's practices. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to examine the constitutionality of military tribunals set up for foreign terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Asked about the secret CIA prisons, President Bush said Monday: "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law."
The European Union has announced that it will investigate whether the CIA is running prisons that already violate the law. In the meantime, Congress can try to mitigate damage to America's image by pressing ahead with the anti-torture legislation. If interrogators are skillful, they don't need to use torture. If the Bush administration is smart, it will embrace Sen. McCain's legislation.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/conte..._edit_1108.html
Palm Beach Post Editorial
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
"We do not torture," President Bush repeated on Monday. Then why is his administration seeking an exemption for the CIA from a torture ban the Senate passed over White House objections?
The classic defense of torture is the need to forcibly extract information from a co-conspirator to prevent an imminent attack on innocent victims. Because torture, once condoned in any form, is so hard to control, most nations have enacted laws and signed treaties pledging not to cross that line. Torture ends up being used against innocent people for purposes of revenge or sadism. The "information" extracted under torture proves unreliable — people will say or admit anything to stop the pain.
In many countries, military officials in particular favor a clear ban on torture because they don't want it practiced against their own troops, should they be captured. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., a prisoner of war during Vietnam, is primary sponsor of the anti-torture legislation. The Bush administration's request for a CIA exemption raises new questions because The Washington Post last week reported that after 9/11, the agency established and still maintains secret prisons in Eastern Europe to hold detainees thought to be members of Al-Qaeda. The Post complied with requests by U.S. officials not to divulge the exact locations. The prisoners are held without rights, an arrangement that would be impossible if they were imprisoned on U.S. soil.
Documented abuse at Abu ######Ghraib prison in Iraq and at a prison facility at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan have cast serious doubt on the Bush administration's practices. On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to examine the constitutionality of military tribunals set up for foreign terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. Asked about the secret CIA prisons, President Bush said Monday: "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. So you bet we will aggressively pursue them but we will do so under the law."
The European Union has announced that it will investigate whether the CIA is running prisons that already violate the law. In the meantime, Congress can try to mitigate damage to America's image by pressing ahead with the anti-torture legislation. If interrogators are skillful, they don't need to use torture. If the Bush administration is smart, it will embrace Sen. McCain's legislation.
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/opinion/conte..._edit_1108.html
Sunday, November 06, 2005
Organizations, Local Governments, Veterans, and the Public Urge End to U.S. Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
As Congress prepares to consider attaching Senator McCain's amendment banning torture to the 2006 Defense appropriations bill, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) and more than 40 national organizations, local government bodies, veterans groups, and retired military officers have issued a letter calling upon the president and members of Congress to ensure an end to the U.S. use of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, and extraordinary rendition.
Kansas City, Mo. - infoZine - The BORDC also presented a petition opposing torture, signed by more than 1200 U.S. residents, to the conferees who will decide whether to attach McCain's amendment to the final Defense budget bill. The Senate passed the amendment on October 5 by a 90-9 vote.
The text of both the letter and petition urge the President and Congress "to affirm that the United States may not, through its own actions or through others acting on its behalf or behest, engage in any acts of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment anywhere in the world."
In clear and forceful language, the BORDC letter affirms that any such acts of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment are "absolute wrongdoings in themselves." But it also points out that degrading practices already used in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere by the U.S., and rendering prisoners to countries known to use torture, undermine the effect at which they purportedly aim, which is to make the country and the world safer from terrorism.
"In addition to inflicting pain," argues the BORDC, "these acts have placed U.S. military and allied personnel at even greater risk. They have also damaged our country's reputation in the eyes of the world and may have discouraged other countries from supporting and assisting us in combating terrorism. They fuel hatred for the United States , giving ammunition to our nation's enemies; and allow governments known to abuse human rights to cite the example of the United States as justification for their disregard of human rights." Quoting both the Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation and Army Regulation, the letter goes on to cite the unreliable results of intelligence extracted by torture, and regulatory prohibitions against "inhumane treatment," specifically: "murder, torture, corporal punishment, mutilation, the taking of hostages, sensory deprivation, collective punishments, execution without trial by proper authority, and all cruel and degrading treatment" such as "rape, forced prostitution, assault and theft, insults, public curiosity, bodily injury, and reprisals of any kind."
"Congress has an opportunity to make Senator McCain's amendment the law of our land and to send a clear, unequivocal message to U.S. troops, the CIA, the American people, and the world that our government will not tolerate the torture and abuse of its detainees," said Nancy Talanian, BORDC Executive Director.
Citing the U.S.'s untenable position as a party to the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the BORDC letter also argues that the U.S. is bound to prevent "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" by its own Constitutional Fifth Amendment ban on self-incrimination, Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment; and Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.
Pointing out that for more than a century the U.S. was well-served by a policy that prohibited torture, the BORDC affirms that "current practices have made the world a more dangerous place, especially for members of our armed forces, and have diminished our country's standing and the example we set for other countries."
The petition, which is a collaboration of the BORDC and the Center for Constitutional Rights, also addressed to President Bush and to Congress, urges these officials to do everything in their power to "stop the torture that threatens the safety of our troops should they fall into enemy hands and that has critically damaged the reputation of the United States around the world." The petition urges that the "prohibition [against torture] must be restored in U.S. policy and practice," if we are to "restore adherence to our Constitution, which you have pledged to uphold and defend."
But the petition also demands that past torture not be forgiven or forgotten, and calls for a full investigation by an independent prosecutor into the roles of high-ranking officials including Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales in torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other U.S.-run facilities around the world; administration adherence to the Supreme Court's 2004 decisions allowing detainees in U.S. custody access to attorneys and the chance to hear the charges against them and to challenge their detentions in a court of law; an end to the practice of hiding thousands of ghost detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross and beyond the reach of law; and an end to the unlawful practice of extraordinary rendition whereby torture is outsourced to other countries.
BORDC Board President Chip Pitts notes that "only a nonpartisan, independent investigation of these shameful and counterproductive acts, which were authorized at the top levels of the U.S. administration, can restore our national credibility and security. The investigations completed to date have implicated only low-level soldiers and none of the top officers or civilian officials, and they have completely ignored the key roles of the CIA and private corporate contractors in abuses and 'extraordinary renditions.' The failure to get to the root of the problem allows this administration to continue its disturbing pattern of secrecy, deception, propaganda, and cover-ups of significant intelligence failures, errors, and abuses."
Letter to President Bush and Conferees for the 2006 Defense Authorization Act ( PDF )
Petition to President Bush and Congress
http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/st...View/sid/11226/
Here is a link to the Bill of Rights Defense Committee sight.
http://bordc.org/
Organizations, Local Governments, Veterans, and the Public Urge End to U.S. Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment
As Congress prepares to consider attaching Senator McCain's amendment banning torture to the 2006 Defense appropriations bill, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee (BORDC) and more than 40 national organizations, local government bodies, veterans groups, and retired military officers have issued a letter calling upon the president and members of Congress to ensure an end to the U.S. use of torture, inhuman and degrading treatment, and extraordinary rendition.
Kansas City, Mo. - infoZine - The BORDC also presented a petition opposing torture, signed by more than 1200 U.S. residents, to the conferees who will decide whether to attach McCain's amendment to the final Defense budget bill. The Senate passed the amendment on October 5 by a 90-9 vote.
The text of both the letter and petition urge the President and Congress "to affirm that the United States may not, through its own actions or through others acting on its behalf or behest, engage in any acts of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment anywhere in the world."
In clear and forceful language, the BORDC letter affirms that any such acts of torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment are "absolute wrongdoings in themselves." But it also points out that degrading practices already used in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere by the U.S., and rendering prisoners to countries known to use torture, undermine the effect at which they purportedly aim, which is to make the country and the world safer from terrorism.
"In addition to inflicting pain," argues the BORDC, "these acts have placed U.S. military and allied personnel at even greater risk. They have also damaged our country's reputation in the eyes of the world and may have discouraged other countries from supporting and assisting us in combating terrorism. They fuel hatred for the United States , giving ammunition to our nation's enemies; and allow governments known to abuse human rights to cite the example of the United States as justification for their disregard of human rights." Quoting both the Army Field Manual on Intelligence Interrogation and Army Regulation, the letter goes on to cite the unreliable results of intelligence extracted by torture, and regulatory prohibitions against "inhumane treatment," specifically: "murder, torture, corporal punishment, mutilation, the taking of hostages, sensory deprivation, collective punishments, execution without trial by proper authority, and all cruel and degrading treatment" such as "rape, forced prostitution, assault and theft, insults, public curiosity, bodily injury, and reprisals of any kind."
"Congress has an opportunity to make Senator McCain's amendment the law of our land and to send a clear, unequivocal message to U.S. troops, the CIA, the American people, and the world that our government will not tolerate the torture and abuse of its detainees," said Nancy Talanian, BORDC Executive Director.
Citing the U.S.'s untenable position as a party to the Geneva Conventions, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, and the Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, the BORDC letter also argues that the U.S. is bound to prevent "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment" by its own Constitutional Fifth Amendment ban on self-incrimination, Eighth Amendment ban on cruel and unusual punishment; and Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.
Pointing out that for more than a century the U.S. was well-served by a policy that prohibited torture, the BORDC affirms that "current practices have made the world a more dangerous place, especially for members of our armed forces, and have diminished our country's standing and the example we set for other countries."
The petition, which is a collaboration of the BORDC and the Center for Constitutional Rights, also addressed to President Bush and to Congress, urges these officials to do everything in their power to "stop the torture that threatens the safety of our troops should they fall into enemy hands and that has critically damaged the reputation of the United States around the world." The petition urges that the "prohibition [against torture] must be restored in U.S. policy and practice," if we are to "restore adherence to our Constitution, which you have pledged to uphold and defend."
But the petition also demands that past torture not be forgiven or forgotten, and calls for a full investigation by an independent prosecutor into the roles of high-ranking officials including Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales in torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other U.S.-run facilities around the world; administration adherence to the Supreme Court's 2004 decisions allowing detainees in U.S. custody access to attorneys and the chance to hear the charges against them and to challenge their detentions in a court of law; an end to the practice of hiding thousands of ghost detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross and beyond the reach of law; and an end to the unlawful practice of extraordinary rendition whereby torture is outsourced to other countries.
BORDC Board President Chip Pitts notes that "only a nonpartisan, independent investigation of these shameful and counterproductive acts, which were authorized at the top levels of the U.S. administration, can restore our national credibility and security. The investigations completed to date have implicated only low-level soldiers and none of the top officers or civilian officials, and they have completely ignored the key roles of the CIA and private corporate contractors in abuses and 'extraordinary renditions.' The failure to get to the root of the problem allows this administration to continue its disturbing pattern of secrecy, deception, propaganda, and cover-ups of significant intelligence failures, errors, and abuses."
Letter to President Bush and Conferees for the 2006 Defense Authorization Act ( PDF )
Petition to President Bush and Congress
http://www.infozine.com/news/stories/op/st...View/sid/11226/
Here is a link to the Bill of Rights Defense Committee sight.
http://bordc.org/
http://www.antiwar.com/engelhardt/?articleid=7941
November 8, 2005
The Wall of Shame
by Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch
[Three weeks ago, Nick Turse wrote a dispatch, "Casualties of the Bush Administration," about government officials who resigned or retired in protest, or were forced over a cliff by this administration. It was, in essence, a proposal for a Wall of Honor. At the time, we realized that it should be accompanied by a Wall of Shame. This, then, is the first of two linked pieces that attempt to apportion a little of the shame and honor. Look for Nick Turse's accompanying piece to follow.]
The motto of this administration might easily be: "failing upward." Of course, that's not hard when those leading the country into catastrophe are also making the appointments and bestowing the honors. Somewhere in this world of ours there should be at least one Wall of Shame (and perhaps an adjoining Wall of Cronyism) for an administration that has heaped favor, position, and honors on those who have blundered, lied, manipulated, and broken the law (not to say, cracked open the Constitution and the republic). Here is just a sampling of the band of culprits who might appear on such a wall and but a few of the things for which they might be held accountable:
Honored for Catastrophe
Former CIA Director George ("slam dunk") Tenet, who oversaw an "intelligence" program of lies, misinformation, abductions, torture, the disappearing of prisoners, and the setting up of a mini-gulag of private prisons from Thailand to Eastern Europe, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom as his tenure at the Agency ended.
Former Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul (I never saw an army I didn't want to disband) Bremer III, under whose leadership in Baghdad the American occupation mis- and displaced more money than is humanly imaginable, and under whose leadership Iraq descended into chaos, awarded the Medal of Freedom.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard ("Guantanamo is a model facility") Myers, who oversaw the Iraq War and whose claim to fame may have been that he called Dan Rather of CBS to try to suppress the first 60 Minutes II report on Abu Ghraib, awarded the Medal of Freedom.
Former Centcom Commander Tommy ("we don't do body counts") Franks, who oversaw "victories" in Afghanistan and Iraq in wars that have never ended, retired to great administration praise and became a "paid patriot," awarded the Medal of Freedom.
Promoted (or Retained) for Disaster
Defense Secretary Donald ("stuff happens") Rumsfeld, who planned the invasion and occupation of Iraq so brilliantly and bragged that he could stand up longer than any Guantánamo detainee, kept on as secretary of defense in George Bush's second term.
Former Undersecretary of Defense Paul ("There is no history of ethnic strife in Iraq") Wolfowitz, who spearheaded the administration's blind cakewalk into Iraq and declared himself "reasonably certain" that the Iraqi people "will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down," was made World Bank president and now prefers not to be "distracted" with ancient "history."
Former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John ("I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the vote" and "there is no such thing as the United Nations") Bolton, who never saw a country he couldn't include in the Axis of Evil, a treaty he wasn't ready to shred, or negotiations he wasn't prepared to sabotage, was given a presidential recess appointment as UN ambassador after his nomination was deep-sixed by Senate Democrats.
The Torture Brigade
Former White House Counsel Alberto (no rules apply) Gonzales, who helped marshal the administration's case for "relaxing" interrogation rules on prisoners, and the man to whom so many of those torture memos were sent, was made attorney general.
Former General Counsel for the Pentagon William J. Haynes II, who appointed a working group to circumvent laws and treaties restricting the administration's urge to torture, developed administration policies to deny detainees at Guantánamo prisoner of war status; developed the Pentagon's military tribunal policy to try them; promoted the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens by the president without legal counsel or judicial review, and recommended (over the protests of military lawyers) many of the most abusive tactics used at Guantánamo, was nominated to a judgeship in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals by George W. Bush on Sept. 29, 2003. Only a Democratic filibuster in the Senate derailed the appointment.
Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice John ("must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.") Yoo, infamous for drafting the August 2002 "torture memo" to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and a supporter of unfettered presidential rule in matters of foreign policy, returned to his position as professor of law at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and wrote a book.
Former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Jay ("certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within [a legal] proscription against torture") Bybee, who was the official author of the August 2002 torture memo , is now a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Former Legal Counsel to the Vice President David Addington, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions," "a principal author of the White House memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects and … a prime advocate of arguments supporting the holding of terrorism suspects without access to courts," known for his "devotion to secrecy" and to an extreme version of unfettered presidential power (as well as a backer of the stalled Haynes judgeship), was promoted to vice-presidential chief of staff after I. Lewis Libby's resignation.
Former head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division Michael Chertoff, who advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002-03 on how far CIA interrogators could go in coercive interrogation methods on terror suspects under the federal anti-torture statute, was appointed head of the Homeland Security Department where he oversaw FEMA's disastrous responses to Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, and where he remains today.
Former principal deputy assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs John Hannah, a conduit for Iraqi exile prewar mis- or disinformation on Saddam's WMD arsenal, involved in producing prewar administration claims linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks and in the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson smear campaign, promoted to national security adviser to Vice President Cheney.
"Demoted"
Former FEMA Director Michael ("I am a fashion god") Brown, who so spectacularly botched the agency's response to hurricane Katrina, is now on the federal payroll as a $148,000-a-year consultant to FEMA.
Former U.S. Military Commander in Iraq Lt. General Ricardo ("Arab fear of dogs") Sanchez, who personally signed off on the use of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, including the use of "working dogs," was to be made head of the U.S. Southern Command and nominated for his fourth star until Pentagon officials came to fear that his role overseeing the Abu Ghraib scandal would create opposition in the Senate, so he was given a major command in Europe.
Former Commander of Joint Task Force Guantánamo Maj. Gen. Geoffrey ("Gitmo-ize the confinement operation") Miller, who brought Guantánamo interrogation methods, including the use of dogs, to Iraq before the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal (reportedly claiming that Arab prisoners "are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe they're more than a dog, then you've lost control of them"), and for his efforts was then made senior commander in charge of detention operations in Iraq, instead of being cashiered in shame, is now assigned to an Army management position in the Washington, D.C., area.
Sadly, while this gallery of rogues was being honored and/or promoted and/or protected, those who really should have received honors and medals were, by and large, overlooked or forgotten – not just figures like ex-Marine and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who insisted before the war (to the sneers of American reporters) that Iraq was unlikely to possess even the shreds of its former WMD program, but all those millions who massed in the streets and insisted that an invasion of Iraq would be a path, paved by lies, that would lead only to madness. No "medals of freedom" for the likes of them.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has just come out in paperback.
Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt
November 8, 2005
The Wall of Shame
by Tom Engelhardt
Tom Dispatch
[Three weeks ago, Nick Turse wrote a dispatch, "Casualties of the Bush Administration," about government officials who resigned or retired in protest, or were forced over a cliff by this administration. It was, in essence, a proposal for a Wall of Honor. At the time, we realized that it should be accompanied by a Wall of Shame. This, then, is the first of two linked pieces that attempt to apportion a little of the shame and honor. Look for Nick Turse's accompanying piece to follow.]
The motto of this administration might easily be: "failing upward." Of course, that's not hard when those leading the country into catastrophe are also making the appointments and bestowing the honors. Somewhere in this world of ours there should be at least one Wall of Shame (and perhaps an adjoining Wall of Cronyism) for an administration that has heaped favor, position, and honors on those who have blundered, lied, manipulated, and broken the law (not to say, cracked open the Constitution and the republic). Here is just a sampling of the band of culprits who might appear on such a wall and but a few of the things for which they might be held accountable:
Honored for Catastrophe
Former CIA Director George ("slam dunk") Tenet, who oversaw an "intelligence" program of lies, misinformation, abductions, torture, the disappearing of prisoners, and the setting up of a mini-gulag of private prisons from Thailand to Eastern Europe, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom as his tenure at the Agency ended.
Former Coalition Provisional Authority head L. Paul (I never saw an army I didn't want to disband) Bremer III, under whose leadership in Baghdad the American occupation mis- and displaced more money than is humanly imaginable, and under whose leadership Iraq descended into chaos, awarded the Medal of Freedom.
Former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard ("Guantanamo is a model facility") Myers, who oversaw the Iraq War and whose claim to fame may have been that he called Dan Rather of CBS to try to suppress the first 60 Minutes II report on Abu Ghraib, awarded the Medal of Freedom.
Former Centcom Commander Tommy ("we don't do body counts") Franks, who oversaw "victories" in Afghanistan and Iraq in wars that have never ended, retired to great administration praise and became a "paid patriot," awarded the Medal of Freedom.
Promoted (or Retained) for Disaster
Defense Secretary Donald ("stuff happens") Rumsfeld, who planned the invasion and occupation of Iraq so brilliantly and bragged that he could stand up longer than any Guantánamo detainee, kept on as secretary of defense in George Bush's second term.
Former Undersecretary of Defense Paul ("There is no history of ethnic strife in Iraq") Wolfowitz, who spearheaded the administration's blind cakewalk into Iraq and declared himself "reasonably certain" that the Iraqi people "will greet us as liberators, and that will help us to keep requirements down," was made World Bank president and now prefers not to be "distracted" with ancient "history."
Former Undersecretary of State for Arms Control and International Security John ("I'm with the Bush-Cheney team, and I'm here to stop the vote" and "there is no such thing as the United Nations") Bolton, who never saw a country he couldn't include in the Axis of Evil, a treaty he wasn't ready to shred, or negotiations he wasn't prepared to sabotage, was given a presidential recess appointment as UN ambassador after his nomination was deep-sixed by Senate Democrats.
The Torture Brigade
Former White House Counsel Alberto (no rules apply) Gonzales, who helped marshal the administration's case for "relaxing" interrogation rules on prisoners, and the man to whom so many of those torture memos were sent, was made attorney general.
Former General Counsel for the Pentagon William J. Haynes II, who appointed a working group to circumvent laws and treaties restricting the administration's urge to torture, developed administration policies to deny detainees at Guantánamo prisoner of war status; developed the Pentagon's military tribunal policy to try them; promoted the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens by the president without legal counsel or judicial review, and recommended (over the protests of military lawyers) many of the most abusive tactics used at Guantánamo, was nominated to a judgeship in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals by George W. Bush on Sept. 29, 2003. Only a Democratic filibuster in the Senate derailed the appointment.
Former Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the Department of Justice John ("must be equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.") Yoo, infamous for drafting the August 2002 "torture memo" to White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales and a supporter of unfettered presidential rule in matters of foreign policy, returned to his position as professor of law at Boalt Hall School of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and wrote a book.
Former Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel Jay ("certain acts may be cruel, inhuman, or degrading, but still not produce pain and suffering of the requisite intensity to fall within [a legal] proscription against torture") Bybee, who was the official author of the August 2002 torture memo , is now a judge on the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Former Legal Counsel to the Vice President David Addington, "a staunch advocate of allowing the president in his capacity as commander in chief to deviate from the Geneva Conventions," "a principal author of the White House memo justifying torture of terrorism suspects and … a prime advocate of arguments supporting the holding of terrorism suspects without access to courts," known for his "devotion to secrecy" and to an extreme version of unfettered presidential power (as well as a backer of the stalled Haynes judgeship), was promoted to vice-presidential chief of staff after I. Lewis Libby's resignation.
Former head of the Justice Department's Criminal Division Michael Chertoff, who advised the Central Intelligence Agency in 2002-03 on how far CIA interrogators could go in coercive interrogation methods on terror suspects under the federal anti-torture statute, was appointed head of the Homeland Security Department where he oversaw FEMA's disastrous responses to Hurricanes Katrina, Rita, and Wilma, and where he remains today.
Former principal deputy assistant to the Vice President for National Security Affairs John Hannah, a conduit for Iraqi exile prewar mis- or disinformation on Saddam's WMD arsenal, involved in producing prewar administration claims linking Saddam Hussein to the 9/11 attacks and in the Valerie Plame/Joseph Wilson smear campaign, promoted to national security adviser to Vice President Cheney.
"Demoted"
Former FEMA Director Michael ("I am a fashion god") Brown, who so spectacularly botched the agency's response to hurricane Katrina, is now on the federal payroll as a $148,000-a-year consultant to FEMA.
Former U.S. Military Commander in Iraq Lt. General Ricardo ("Arab fear of dogs") Sanchez, who personally signed off on the use of coercive interrogation techniques outlawed by the Geneva Conventions, including the use of "working dogs," was to be made head of the U.S. Southern Command and nominated for his fourth star until Pentagon officials came to fear that his role overseeing the Abu Ghraib scandal would create opposition in the Senate, so he was given a major command in Europe.
Former Commander of Joint Task Force Guantánamo Maj. Gen. Geoffrey ("Gitmo-ize the confinement operation") Miller, who brought Guantánamo interrogation methods, including the use of dogs, to Iraq before the Abu Ghraib prisoner-abuse scandal (reportedly claiming that Arab prisoners "are like dogs, and if you allow them to believe they're more than a dog, then you've lost control of them"), and for his efforts was then made senior commander in charge of detention operations in Iraq, instead of being cashiered in shame, is now assigned to an Army management position in the Washington, D.C., area.
Sadly, while this gallery of rogues was being honored and/or promoted and/or protected, those who really should have received honors and medals were, by and large, overlooked or forgotten – not just figures like ex-Marine and former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter, who insisted before the war (to the sneers of American reporters) that Iraq was unlikely to possess even the shreds of its former WMD program, but all those millions who massed in the streets and insisted that an invasion of Iraq would be a path, paved by lies, that would lead only to madness. No "medals of freedom" for the likes of them.
Tom Engelhardt, who runs the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com ("a regular antidote to the mainstream media"), is the co-founder of the American Empire Project and the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of American triumphalism in the Cold War. His novel, The Last Days of Publishing, has just come out in paperback.
Copyright 2005 Tom Engelhardt
Current Threats: U.S. Use of Torture, Inhuman and Degrading Treatment, and Rendition
In this page:
About U.S. Use of Torture
Education and Action: Petitions, Letters, and Legislation
Legislation Against Torture and Extraordinary Rendition
Treaties Against Torture to which the U.S. is a Party
Bush Administration Torture Memos, Taguba Findings on Abu Ghraib
Findings and Reports
About U.S. Use of Torture
For more than a century, until recently, U.S. policy prohibited torture. Since September 11, 2001, however, members of the Bush administration, including President Bush and former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, have made statements and issued memos, many of them classified, that signal shifts in that policy.
For example:
Descriptions of abuse, torture, and murder at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison match experiences of detainees in prisons from Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Brooklyn, and elsewhere around the world.
Most of the reported 108 deaths of prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan have been caused by torture and abuse.
Since September 11, 2001, the CIA has sent between 100 and 150 suspects overseas for interrogation. The U.S. government euphemistically refers to the practice as "extraordinary rendition," but it is commonly being called "outsourcing torture." The best known rendition incident is that of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was diverted to Syria for more than a year of interrogation and torture after changing planes at New York's JFK Airport while returning home from a trip overseas.
A March 19, 2005, article in The Guardian reported, "The floating population of 'ghost detainees', according to US and UK military officials, now exceeds 10,000." A March 2005 article in the Washington Post reveals that the U.S. Army and the CIA agreed on the ghost detainees at Abu Ghraib.
The American public and the press overwhelmingly condemned torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment as morally wrong. Their use violates U.S. law and international treaties and endangers U.S. military personnel should they be captured.
Moreover, according to international law, testimony obtained by using torture is inadmissible. Information obtained via such methods is often false. Consequently, in July 2004, the German government dropped charges against Mounir Mtassadeq, alleged to have been a member of al-Qaeda's Hamburg cell, because the testimony of Ramzi Binalshieb and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, both held by the CIA, had reportedly been obtained using torture. FBI email messages from May 2004 that were partially declassified in March 2005 revealed that (1) intelligence obtained at Guantanamo Bay using harsh methods was "suspect at best" and (2) the FBI had made it known to the Pentago that it "has been successful for many years obtaining confessions via non-confrontational interviewing techniques."
BACK TO TOP
Education and Action
The American people and their government know that the abhorrent practices of torture and degrading treatmentare wrong, whether they are carried out by U.S. government forces or by other countries acting on our government's behalf. The Bush administration is sending mixed messages about its stance on these practices, and is classifying documents on the basis of their embarrassing contents rather than national security. Public support for ending the practices is needed to ensure that the people and the government speak with one voice.
Sign-on letter. On November 3, 2005, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee faxed this letter from national organizations, local governments, veterans groups, and individuals to the conference committee for the 2006 Defense Authorization Act and President Bush, with copies to all members of Congress.
Petition. You can sign our online petition against torture and extraordinary rendition online. You can also print the petition (PDF) and collect signatures in your community. Our goal is to collect 200,000 signatures. Petitions are useful for gauging public sentiment and as one-on-one educational tools.
Write your representatives. Send a message directly to your Senators and Representatives asking them to oppose torture. Your representatives in Congress need to hear from you!
Support legislation. Two bills have been introduced in the 109th Congress, and more are expected. Visit BORDC's legislation page for updates on other bills and strategies to end torture and extraordinary rendition. Sign up for BORDC's monthly newsletter and action alerts to stay informed.
Host a public reading of the play Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom' as part of the nationwide Guantanamo Reading Project.
Other educational methods such as forums, letters to the editor, press releases, articles and op-eds, theater. These are just a few suggestions for increasing public interest, awareness, and debate in these issues for the purpose of ensuring that our government's actions match its words and adhere to U.S. and international law. Let us know what you've done in your community that was successful, so that we can share it with others.
Here are a few points you are welcome to use. The Bush Administration and the Pentagon claim their policies forbid torture. However:
Independent investigation. The White House and Republican leaders are preventing a congressional investigation.
The recent investigation by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church III, which cleared the Pentagon chiefs of wrongdoing, was an internal Pentagon review by a 3-star officer whose career could have been killed had he been honest. Church's mission did not include interviews with top Pentagon officials, such as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who appointed Church to "investigate."
At a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting on March 17, Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, characterized Senator John McCain's questioning of CIA Director Porter Goss about CIA renditions and interrogations as "an almost pathological obsession with calling into question the actions of men and women who are on the front lines of the war on terror." Read March 18, 2005, article in the Washington Post.
President supports extraordinary rendition. On March 16, President Bush reiterated his support for the practice known as extraordinary rendition, which actually means outsourcing torture. President Bush tried to disguise the practice by describing it as "sending terrorists back to their home country." Maher Arar's home country is Canada, not Syria. One key difference between Canada and Syria is that Canada is not on the U.S. State Department's list of countries known to use torture; Syria is.
Double standards in State Department's 2004 Human Rights Reports. On February 28, 2005, the U.S. Department of State officially released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The following excerpt from one report could describe the United States:
"Abuses included instances of extrajudicial killings; torture and mistreatment of prisoners, leading to numerous deaths in custody; coerced confessions; arbitrary arrest and detention; and incommunicado detention."
The United States was excluded from the report. The excerpt is from the report on China. In December 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved U.S. use of many interrogation practices for which other countries, but not the United States, were cited. Several countries were quick to point out the hypocrisy. Three days after the State Department report came out, the cabinet of Premier Wen Jiabao issued the following statement:
"No country should exclude itself from the international human rights development process or view itself as the incarnation of human rights that can reign over other countries and give orders to the others."
The Information Office of China's State Council issued its own report, Human Rights Record of the US in 2004.
Amnesty International USA issued a press release stating that "the Bush Administration's practice of 'rendering' detainees to countries that the report cites as having abysmal human rights records, runs the risk of turning the report into a guide to overseas torture subcontractors."
Attorney General misinterprets Geneva Conventions. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in his confirmation hearings claimed that the Geneva Conventions outlawing torture do not apply to aliens outside the United States.
BACK TO TOP
Legislation Against Torture and Extraordinary Rendition
On October 5, 2005, by a vote of 90 to 9, the U.S. Senate passed John McCain's amendment #1977 requiring humane treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Its passage means that the amendment is attached to the defense spending bill for 2006, which the Senate is sure to pass. The few Senators who did not vote in favor of the amendment are: Allard (CO), Bond (MO), Coburn (OK), Cochran (MS), Cornyn (TX), Inhofe (OK), Roberts (KS), Sessions (AL), and Stevens (AK). Senator Corzine of New Jersey did not vote.
Despite the amendment's overwhelming support in the Senate, it faces an uphill battle before it becomes law. No anti-torture amendment was attached to the House defense spending bill, so a House-and-Senate conference committee (conferees not yet named) must meet to decide the amendment's fate. IF the conferees attach the amendment to the final bill AND it passes both the House and the Senate, President Bush may still carry out his threat to veto the bill.
Visit our Legislation page for more information and links.
Call for an independent investigation. The Center for Constitutional Rights is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate torture by U.S. personnel. Click here to send Congress your message calling for a special prosecutor to look into the roles of high-ranking U.S. officials in torture.
BACK TO TOP
Treaties Against Torture to which the U.S. is a Party
Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
BACK TO TOP
Bush Administration Torture Memos, Taguba Findings on Abu Ghraib
Jan. 22, 2002: Justice Department Memo to the White House and Pentagon Counsels
Feb. 1, 2002: Letter to President Bush From Attorney General Ashcroft
Feb. 7, 2002: Justice Department Memo to the White House Counsel
Feb. 7, 2002: Memo Signed by President Bush
Feb. 26, 2002: Justice Department Memo to the Pentagon's General Counsel
Aug. 1, 2002: Justice Department Memo to the White House Counsel (Jay Bybee memo)
Dec. 2, 2002: Defense Department Memo Regarding "Counter-Resistance Techniques"
One-page summary document issued to reporters by Bush aides on June 22, 2004, that reviewed which specific techniques were approved and used
Jan. 15, 2003: Rumsfeld Memo to the Head of U.S. Southern Command
Jan. 15, 2003: Rumsfeld Memo to the Pentagon Counsel
Jan. 17, 2003: Memo From the Pentagon Counsel to the General Counsel for the Air Force
April 4, 2003: Report of the Pentagon Working Group
April 16, 2003: Rumsfeld Memo to the Head of U.S. Southern Command
BACK TO TOP
Findings and Reports
September 2005, Human Rights Watch, Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division
April 28, 2005, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, Renditions: Constraints Imposed by Laws on Torture
General Antonio M. Taguba, Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Abu Ghraib Prison, Baghdad
11/30/04 Memo, International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC's Work at Guantanamo Bay
Human Rights First Assessment, One Year After the Abu Ghraib Torture Photos: U.S. Government Response 'Grossly Inadequate'
Physicians for Human Rights, BREAK THEM DOWN: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by US Forces
Human Rights First, Guantanamo Bay Detainee Statements (regarding religious degradation)
Also see BORDC's Recommended Resources page, which includes books about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons.
http://www.bordc.org/threats/torture.php
In this page:
About U.S. Use of Torture
Education and Action: Petitions, Letters, and Legislation
Legislation Against Torture and Extraordinary Rendition
Treaties Against Torture to which the U.S. is a Party
Bush Administration Torture Memos, Taguba Findings on Abu Ghraib
Findings and Reports
About U.S. Use of Torture
For more than a century, until recently, U.S. policy prohibited torture. Since September 11, 2001, however, members of the Bush administration, including President Bush and former White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales, have made statements and issued memos, many of them classified, that signal shifts in that policy.
For example:
Descriptions of abuse, torture, and murder at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison match experiences of detainees in prisons from Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, Brooklyn, and elsewhere around the world.
Most of the reported 108 deaths of prisoners in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan have been caused by torture and abuse.
Since September 11, 2001, the CIA has sent between 100 and 150 suspects overseas for interrogation. The U.S. government euphemistically refers to the practice as "extraordinary rendition," but it is commonly being called "outsourcing torture." The best known rendition incident is that of Maher Arar, a Syrian-born Canadian who was diverted to Syria for more than a year of interrogation and torture after changing planes at New York's JFK Airport while returning home from a trip overseas.
A March 19, 2005, article in The Guardian reported, "The floating population of 'ghost detainees', according to US and UK military officials, now exceeds 10,000." A March 2005 article in the Washington Post reveals that the U.S. Army and the CIA agreed on the ghost detainees at Abu Ghraib.
The American public and the press overwhelmingly condemned torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment as morally wrong. Their use violates U.S. law and international treaties and endangers U.S. military personnel should they be captured.
Moreover, according to international law, testimony obtained by using torture is inadmissible. Information obtained via such methods is often false. Consequently, in July 2004, the German government dropped charges against Mounir Mtassadeq, alleged to have been a member of al-Qaeda's Hamburg cell, because the testimony of Ramzi Binalshieb and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, both held by the CIA, had reportedly been obtained using torture. FBI email messages from May 2004 that were partially declassified in March 2005 revealed that (1) intelligence obtained at Guantanamo Bay using harsh methods was "suspect at best" and (2) the FBI had made it known to the Pentago that it "has been successful for many years obtaining confessions via non-confrontational interviewing techniques."
BACK TO TOP
Education and Action
The American people and their government know that the abhorrent practices of torture and degrading treatmentare wrong, whether they are carried out by U.S. government forces or by other countries acting on our government's behalf. The Bush administration is sending mixed messages about its stance on these practices, and is classifying documents on the basis of their embarrassing contents rather than national security. Public support for ending the practices is needed to ensure that the people and the government speak with one voice.
Sign-on letter. On November 3, 2005, the Bill of Rights Defense Committee faxed this letter from national organizations, local governments, veterans groups, and individuals to the conference committee for the 2006 Defense Authorization Act and President Bush, with copies to all members of Congress.
Petition. You can sign our online petition against torture and extraordinary rendition online. You can also print the petition (PDF) and collect signatures in your community. Our goal is to collect 200,000 signatures. Petitions are useful for gauging public sentiment and as one-on-one educational tools.
Write your representatives. Send a message directly to your Senators and Representatives asking them to oppose torture. Your representatives in Congress need to hear from you!
Support legislation. Two bills have been introduced in the 109th Congress, and more are expected. Visit BORDC's legislation page for updates on other bills and strategies to end torture and extraordinary rendition. Sign up for BORDC's monthly newsletter and action alerts to stay informed.
Host a public reading of the play Guantanamo: 'Honor Bound to Defend Freedom' as part of the nationwide Guantanamo Reading Project.
Other educational methods such as forums, letters to the editor, press releases, articles and op-eds, theater. These are just a few suggestions for increasing public interest, awareness, and debate in these issues for the purpose of ensuring that our government's actions match its words and adhere to U.S. and international law. Let us know what you've done in your community that was successful, so that we can share it with others.
Here are a few points you are welcome to use. The Bush Administration and the Pentagon claim their policies forbid torture. However:
Independent investigation. The White House and Republican leaders are preventing a congressional investigation.
The recent investigation by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church III, which cleared the Pentagon chiefs of wrongdoing, was an internal Pentagon review by a 3-star officer whose career could have been killed had he been honest. Church's mission did not include interviews with top Pentagon officials, such as Pentagon chief Donald Rumsfeld, who appointed Church to "investigate."
At a Senate Armed Services Committee meeting on March 17, Senator Pat Roberts, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, characterized Senator John McCain's questioning of CIA Director Porter Goss about CIA renditions and interrogations as "an almost pathological obsession with calling into question the actions of men and women who are on the front lines of the war on terror." Read March 18, 2005, article in the Washington Post.
President supports extraordinary rendition. On March 16, President Bush reiterated his support for the practice known as extraordinary rendition, which actually means outsourcing torture. President Bush tried to disguise the practice by describing it as "sending terrorists back to their home country." Maher Arar's home country is Canada, not Syria. One key difference between Canada and Syria is that Canada is not on the U.S. State Department's list of countries known to use torture; Syria is.
Double standards in State Department's 2004 Human Rights Reports. On February 28, 2005, the U.S. Department of State officially released its Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. The following excerpt from one report could describe the United States:
"Abuses included instances of extrajudicial killings; torture and mistreatment of prisoners, leading to numerous deaths in custody; coerced confessions; arbitrary arrest and detention; and incommunicado detention."
The United States was excluded from the report. The excerpt is from the report on China. In December 2002, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved U.S. use of many interrogation practices for which other countries, but not the United States, were cited. Several countries were quick to point out the hypocrisy. Three days after the State Department report came out, the cabinet of Premier Wen Jiabao issued the following statement:
"No country should exclude itself from the international human rights development process or view itself as the incarnation of human rights that can reign over other countries and give orders to the others."
The Information Office of China's State Council issued its own report, Human Rights Record of the US in 2004.
Amnesty International USA issued a press release stating that "the Bush Administration's practice of 'rendering' detainees to countries that the report cites as having abysmal human rights records, runs the risk of turning the report into a guide to overseas torture subcontractors."
Attorney General misinterprets Geneva Conventions. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in his confirmation hearings claimed that the Geneva Conventions outlawing torture do not apply to aliens outside the United States.
BACK TO TOP
Legislation Against Torture and Extraordinary Rendition
On October 5, 2005, by a vote of 90 to 9, the U.S. Senate passed John McCain's amendment #1977 requiring humane treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Its passage means that the amendment is attached to the defense spending bill for 2006, which the Senate is sure to pass. The few Senators who did not vote in favor of the amendment are: Allard (CO), Bond (MO), Coburn (OK), Cochran (MS), Cornyn (TX), Inhofe (OK), Roberts (KS), Sessions (AL), and Stevens (AK). Senator Corzine of New Jersey did not vote.
Despite the amendment's overwhelming support in the Senate, it faces an uphill battle before it becomes law. No anti-torture amendment was attached to the House defense spending bill, so a House-and-Senate conference committee (conferees not yet named) must meet to decide the amendment's fate. IF the conferees attach the amendment to the final bill AND it passes both the House and the Senate, President Bush may still carry out his threat to veto the bill.
Visit our Legislation page for more information and links.
Call for an independent investigation. The Center for Constitutional Rights is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate torture by U.S. personnel. Click here to send Congress your message calling for a special prosecutor to look into the roles of high-ranking U.S. officials in torture.
BACK TO TOP
Treaties Against Torture to which the U.S. is a Party
Geneva Convention relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights
Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment
BACK TO TOP
Bush Administration Torture Memos, Taguba Findings on Abu Ghraib
Jan. 22, 2002: Justice Department Memo to the White House and Pentagon Counsels
Feb. 1, 2002: Letter to President Bush From Attorney General Ashcroft
Feb. 7, 2002: Justice Department Memo to the White House Counsel
Feb. 7, 2002: Memo Signed by President Bush
Feb. 26, 2002: Justice Department Memo to the Pentagon's General Counsel
Aug. 1, 2002: Justice Department Memo to the White House Counsel (Jay Bybee memo)
Dec. 2, 2002: Defense Department Memo Regarding "Counter-Resistance Techniques"
One-page summary document issued to reporters by Bush aides on June 22, 2004, that reviewed which specific techniques were approved and used
Jan. 15, 2003: Rumsfeld Memo to the Head of U.S. Southern Command
Jan. 15, 2003: Rumsfeld Memo to the Pentagon Counsel
Jan. 17, 2003: Memo From the Pentagon Counsel to the General Counsel for the Air Force
April 4, 2003: Report of the Pentagon Working Group
April 16, 2003: Rumsfeld Memo to the Head of U.S. Southern Command
BACK TO TOP
Findings and Reports
September 2005, Human Rights Watch, Leadership Failure: Firsthand Accounts of Torture of Iraqi Detainees by the U.S. Army's 82nd Airborne Division
April 28, 2005, Congressional Research Service Report for Congress, Renditions: Constraints Imposed by Laws on Torture
General Antonio M. Taguba, Article 15-6 Investigation of the 800th Military Police Brigade, Abu Ghraib Prison, Baghdad
11/30/04 Memo, International Committee of the Red Cross, ICRC's Work at Guantanamo Bay
Human Rights First Assessment, One Year After the Abu Ghraib Torture Photos: U.S. Government Response 'Grossly Inadequate'
Physicians for Human Rights, BREAK THEM DOWN: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by US Forces
Human Rights First, Guantanamo Bay Detainee Statements (regarding religious degradation)
Also see BORDC's Recommended Resources page, which includes books about Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prisons.
http://www.bordc.org/threats/torture.php
This is an online petition that you can sign. The link is at the bottom of the page. Here is what the petition says.
Tell President Bush & Congress:
TORTURE IS NOT AN AMERICAN VALUE
We, the undersigned, urge President Bush and our senators and representatives in Congress to stop the torture that threatens the safety of our troops should they fall into enemy hands and that has critically damaged the reputation of the United States around the world. We call for the following:
A full investigation and independent prosecutor to look into the roles of high-ranking officials including Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales in torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other U.S.-run facilities around the world.
The Bush Administration's adherence to the Supreme Court's 2004 decisions allowing detainees in U.S. custody access to attorneys and the chance to hear the charges against them and to challenge their detentions in a court of law.
An end to the practice of hiding thousands of ghost detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross and beyond the reach of law.
An end to the unlawful practice of extraordinary rendition whereby torture is outsourced to other countries.
All fields are required except those marked "optional."
Email
Prefix Select . . . Ms. Mrs. Miss Mr. Dr. Prof. Rabbi Rev.
First name
Middle initial (optional)
Last name
Street address
City / town
State Select . . . AA AE AK AL AP AR AS AZ CA CO CT DC DE FL FM GA GU HI IA ID IL IN KS KY LA MA MD ME MH MI MN MO MP MS MT NC ND NE NH NJ NM NV NY OH OK OR PA PR PW RI SC SD TN TX UT VA VI VT WA WI WV WY
ZIP+4 - (Plus4 code is optional)
· I would like to receive email updates on this campaign : Yes No
· Sign me up for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee email newsletter: Yes No
Privacy policy: We do not share our subscriber list with anyone.
http://bordc.org/petition/index.php
Tell President Bush & Congress:
TORTURE IS NOT AN AMERICAN VALUE
We, the undersigned, urge President Bush and our senators and representatives in Congress to stop the torture that threatens the safety of our troops should they fall into enemy hands and that has critically damaged the reputation of the United States around the world. We call for the following:
A full investigation and independent prosecutor to look into the roles of high-ranking officials including Donald Rumsfeld and Alberto Gonzales in torture at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and other U.S.-run facilities around the world.
The Bush Administration's adherence to the Supreme Court's 2004 decisions allowing detainees in U.S. custody access to attorneys and the chance to hear the charges against them and to challenge their detentions in a court of law.
An end to the practice of hiding thousands of ghost detainees from the International Committee of the Red Cross and beyond the reach of law.
An end to the unlawful practice of extraordinary rendition whereby torture is outsourced to other countries.
All fields are required except those marked "optional."
Prefix Select . . . Ms. Mrs. Miss Mr. Dr. Prof. Rabbi Rev.
First name
Middle initial (optional)
Last name
Street address
City / town
State Select . . . AA AE AK AL AP AR AS AZ CA CO CT DC DE FL FM GA GU HI IA ID IL IN KS KY LA MA MD ME MH MI MN MO MP MS MT NC ND NE NH NJ NM NV NY OH OK OR PA PR PW RI SC SD TN TX UT VA VI VT WA WI WV WY
ZIP+4 - (Plus4 code is optional)
· I would like to receive email updates on this campaign : Yes No
· Sign me up for the Bill of Rights Defense Committee email newsletter: Yes No
Privacy policy: We do not share our subscriber list with anyone.
http://bordc.org/petition/index.php
No Other Torture Claims in Bush Plot Trial
By MATTHEW BARAKAT
The Associated Press
Monday, November 7, 2005; 6:20 PM
ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- A Briton and a Canadian who say they were tortured into false confessions by Saudi authorities will not be allowed to testify at the trial of a man accused of joining al-Qaida and plotting to assassinate President Bush, a judge ruled Monday.
Lawyers for Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, an American on trial for numerous terrorism charges, had hoped the men's testimony would bolster Abu Ali's contention that he was tortured into a false confession.
Abu Ali, 24, confessed to the Saudis in July 2003 that he joined al-Qaida while enrolled at a Medina university. He told them he was motivated by his hatred of the United States for its support of Israel and that al-Qaida asked him to establish a terror cell in the United States.
He now says he falsely confessed only after being whipped and beaten by the Saudi security force known as the Mubahith.
Defense lawyer Khurrum Wahid said the testimony of the two men, Briton Ron Jones and Canadian William Sampson, was necessary to counter claims by Mubahith officials that they do not mistreat prisoners.
But U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee agreed with prosecutors, who argued that the only relevant question is whether Abu Ali was tortured, not whether Jones and Sampson were tortured.
Both Jones and Sampson said they falsely confessed to involvement in a 2000 car bombing in Riyadh. The Saudi government claims the car bomb stemmed from a feud among Western bootleggers; Jones and Sampson say it was the work of anti-Western fundamentalists. The two were granted amnesty and freed in 2003.
Also Monday, jurors heard videotaped testimony from a Mubahith general who said Abu Ali cooperated after interrogators assured him he would not be turned over to the United States for prosecution. Abu Ali was returned to the United States in February to face trial.
In the confession, Abu Ali said that the leader of an al-Qaida cell in Medina, Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi, asked him "to go to America and he would be the leader" of an al-Qaida cell and that the assassination of Bush would be among the cell's duties, according to the general, whose name was not released.
Abu Ali, who was born in Houston and grew up in Falls Church, faces up to life in prison if convicted.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0701169_pf.html
By MATTHEW BARAKAT
The Associated Press
Monday, November 7, 2005; 6:20 PM
ALEXANDRIA, Va. -- A Briton and a Canadian who say they were tortured into false confessions by Saudi authorities will not be allowed to testify at the trial of a man accused of joining al-Qaida and plotting to assassinate President Bush, a judge ruled Monday.
Lawyers for Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, an American on trial for numerous terrorism charges, had hoped the men's testimony would bolster Abu Ali's contention that he was tortured into a false confession.
Abu Ali, 24, confessed to the Saudis in July 2003 that he joined al-Qaida while enrolled at a Medina university. He told them he was motivated by his hatred of the United States for its support of Israel and that al-Qaida asked him to establish a terror cell in the United States.
He now says he falsely confessed only after being whipped and beaten by the Saudi security force known as the Mubahith.
Defense lawyer Khurrum Wahid said the testimony of the two men, Briton Ron Jones and Canadian William Sampson, was necessary to counter claims by Mubahith officials that they do not mistreat prisoners.
But U.S. District Judge Gerald Bruce Lee agreed with prosecutors, who argued that the only relevant question is whether Abu Ali was tortured, not whether Jones and Sampson were tortured.
Both Jones and Sampson said they falsely confessed to involvement in a 2000 car bombing in Riyadh. The Saudi government claims the car bomb stemmed from a feud among Western bootleggers; Jones and Sampson say it was the work of anti-Western fundamentalists. The two were granted amnesty and freed in 2003.
Also Monday, jurors heard videotaped testimony from a Mubahith general who said Abu Ali cooperated after interrogators assured him he would not be turned over to the United States for prosecution. Abu Ali was returned to the United States in February to face trial.
In the confession, Abu Ali said that the leader of an al-Qaida cell in Medina, Ali Abd al-Rahman al-Faqasi, asked him "to go to America and he would be the leader" of an al-Qaida cell and that the assassination of Bush would be among the cell's duties, according to the general, whose name was not released.
Abu Ali, who was born in Houston and grew up in Falls Church, faces up to life in prison if convicted.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...0701169_pf.html
http://fairuse.1accesshost.com/news5/nyt25.htm
November 8, 2005
Pentagon Plans Tighter Control of Interrogation
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - The Pentagon has approved a new policy directive governing interrogations as part of an effort to tighten controls over the questioning of terror suspects and other prisoners by American soldiers.
The eight-page directive, which was signed without any public announcement last Thursday by Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, will allow the Army to issue a long-delayed field manual for interrogators that is supposed to incorporate the lessons gleaned from the prisoner-abuse scandals last year.
The Army intends, for example, to ensure that interrogation techniques are approved, up to the highest levels in the Pentagon, that interrogators are properly trained and that personnel in the field are required to report any abuses, Army officials said.
Such changes have been under consideration since the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison were disclosed in April 2004, and reflect continuing problems with abuses by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq since then.
The Senate has approved a measure by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, i to ban abusive treatment of prisoners in American custody.
The new interrogations directive is also part of a wider effort by the Defense Department, which began last December, to review the treatment of prisoners in military custody.
A second directive, governing all aspects of prisoner detentions, not just interrogation methods, has caused sharp debate within the Bush administration. At issue is whether the Pentagon's broad guidelines on detention should include language from the Geneva Conventions barring the use of "cruel," "humiliating" and degrading treatment.
Some Pentagon officials said the interrogations directive was issued now in part to mollify critics in Congress, where new strictures on intelligence are being debated and where an amendment to a military spending bill by Mr. McCain would prohibit the use of cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners.
A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that the timing of the interrogations directive was unrelated to the initiatives on Capitol Hill and that the instruction consolidated and codified many procedures that had been put in place as a result of a dozen military investigations into prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"This directive provides the overarching Department of Defense policy that mandates humane treatment of detainees," Mr. Whitman said.
President Bush, in remarks in Panama City after meeting with President Martín Torrijos of Panama, sought to deflect recent reports of detainee mistreatment and secret interrogation sites around the world. "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people," Mr. Bush said. "Anything we do to that end, in that effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture."
The new Directive 3115.09, "DoD Intelligence Interrogations, Detainee Debriefings, and Tactical Questioning," assigns responsibilities for interrogation activities to senior Pentagon civilians and commanders; establishes requirements for reporting violations of the policy; and requires that Central Intelligence Agency interrogators follow Pentagon guidelines when questioning military prisoners.
It also reaffirms that military working dogs may not be used in interrogations and that military police may assist interrogators by providing information about detainees' behavior, but may not participate in the interrogations themselves.
"Acts of physical or mental torture are prohibited," says the directive, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. The policy directive does not elaborate other than to order that detainees be treated humanely "in accordance with applicable law and policy."
Approval of the interrogations policy now allows the Army to issue a new field manual on interrogations, which was largely completed months ago but has been delayed until the policy review was completed. "It will be released very shortly," said an Army policy maker, who like most officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity because the interrogations policy has not been publicly announced.
Army officials have said the new manual, the first revision in 13 years, incorporates safeguards devised to prevent the harsh techniques disclosed in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
Interrogation techniques sought by Army field commanders must be forwarded for review as high as the secretary of defense's office. All interrogators must be trained and certified as prepared to do the job.
One defense official said that parts of the manual were still vague and did not break any new ground in terms of acceptable interrogation techniques. The official said the field manual was an exceptionally important document for the Army, one that would not only guide the training of future interrogators but that would be scrutinized for how it incorporated the lessons of the abuse scandals that began with Abu Ghraib.
"There is a lot more that could have been done," the official said. "It could have been clearer." Army officials responded that the new manual, known as FM 2-22.3, would be accompanied by a separate classified training document providing dozens of interrogation situations and going into exacting detail on what procedures might and might not be used.
While Mr. England's approval of the interrogations directive advances that part of the overall policy, a fierce debate still embroils another major detention-policy document under revision, Directive 2310.01, "DoD program for Enemy Prisoners of War and Other Detainees."
Two department officials said that Vice President Dick Cheney's new chief of staff, David S. Addington, had continued to press senior Pentagon officials to eliminate language from the Geneva Conventions prohibiting "cruel," "humiliating," and "degrading" treatment. Other senior Pentagon and State Department officials, as well as military lawyers and the military's vice chiefs of staff support such language.
Mr. Cheney last Tuesday appealed to Republican senators in a private lunch meeting to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from similar language that is contained in Mr. McCain's provision.
The officials said they believed a compromise version of the contentious directive could eliminate an explicit reference to the Geneva Conventions language and replace it with wording that captured substance of the prohibitions; for example, that humane treatment required provision of food, water, shelter, access to religious worship and a ban on torture.
The Senate could vote as early as Tuesday on yet another detainee issue, a proposal by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, to create an independent commission to investigate prisoner abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
November 8, 2005
Pentagon Plans Tighter Control of Interrogation
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - The Pentagon has approved a new policy directive governing interrogations as part of an effort to tighten controls over the questioning of terror suspects and other prisoners by American soldiers.
The eight-page directive, which was signed without any public announcement last Thursday by Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, will allow the Army to issue a long-delayed field manual for interrogators that is supposed to incorporate the lessons gleaned from the prisoner-abuse scandals last year.
The Army intends, for example, to ensure that interrogation techniques are approved, up to the highest levels in the Pentagon, that interrogators are properly trained and that personnel in the field are required to report any abuses, Army officials said.
Such changes have been under consideration since the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison were disclosed in April 2004, and reflect continuing problems with abuses by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq since then.
The Senate has approved a measure by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, i to ban abusive treatment of prisoners in American custody.
The new interrogations directive is also part of a wider effort by the Defense Department, which began last December, to review the treatment of prisoners in military custody.
A second directive, governing all aspects of prisoner detentions, not just interrogation methods, has caused sharp debate within the Bush administration. At issue is whether the Pentagon's broad guidelines on detention should include language from the Geneva Conventions barring the use of "cruel," "humiliating" and degrading treatment.
Some Pentagon officials said the interrogations directive was issued now in part to mollify critics in Congress, where new strictures on intelligence are being debated and where an amendment to a military spending bill by Mr. McCain would prohibit the use of cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners.
A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that the timing of the interrogations directive was unrelated to the initiatives on Capitol Hill and that the instruction consolidated and codified many procedures that had been put in place as a result of a dozen military investigations into prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"This directive provides the overarching Department of Defense policy that mandates humane treatment of detainees," Mr. Whitman said.
President Bush, in remarks in Panama City after meeting with President Martín Torrijos of Panama, sought to deflect recent reports of detainee mistreatment and secret interrogation sites around the world. "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people," Mr. Bush said. "Anything we do to that end, in that effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture."
The new Directive 3115.09, "DoD Intelligence Interrogations, Detainee Debriefings, and Tactical Questioning," assigns responsibilities for interrogation activities to senior Pentagon civilians and commanders; establishes requirements for reporting violations of the policy; and requires that Central Intelligence Agency interrogators follow Pentagon guidelines when questioning military prisoners.
It also reaffirms that military working dogs may not be used in interrogations and that military police may assist interrogators by providing information about detainees' behavior, but may not participate in the interrogations themselves.
"Acts of physical or mental torture are prohibited," says the directive, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. The policy directive does not elaborate other than to order that detainees be treated humanely "in accordance with applicable law and policy."
Approval of the interrogations policy now allows the Army to issue a new field manual on interrogations, which was largely completed months ago but has been delayed until the policy review was completed. "It will be released very shortly," said an Army policy maker, who like most officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity because the interrogations policy has not been publicly announced.
Army officials have said the new manual, the first revision in 13 years, incorporates safeguards devised to prevent the harsh techniques disclosed in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
Interrogation techniques sought by Army field commanders must be forwarded for review as high as the secretary of defense's office. All interrogators must be trained and certified as prepared to do the job.
One defense official said that parts of the manual were still vague and did not break any new ground in terms of acceptable interrogation techniques. The official said the field manual was an exceptionally important document for the Army, one that would not only guide the training of future interrogators but that would be scrutinized for how it incorporated the lessons of the abuse scandals that began with Abu Ghraib.
"There is a lot more that could have been done," the official said. "It could have been clearer." Army officials responded that the new manual, known as FM 2-22.3, would be accompanied by a separate classified training document providing dozens of interrogation situations and going into exacting detail on what procedures might and might not be used.
While Mr. England's approval of the interrogations directive advances that part of the overall policy, a fierce debate still embroils another major detention-policy document under revision, Directive 2310.01, "DoD program for Enemy Prisoners of War and Other Detainees."
Two department officials said that Vice President Dick Cheney's new chief of staff, David S. Addington, had continued to press senior Pentagon officials to eliminate language from the Geneva Conventions prohibiting "cruel," "humiliating," and "degrading" treatment. Other senior Pentagon and State Department officials, as well as military lawyers and the military's vice chiefs of staff support such language.
Mr. Cheney last Tuesday appealed to Republican senators in a private lunch meeting to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from similar language that is contained in Mr. McCain's provision.
The officials said they believed a compromise version of the contentious directive could eliminate an explicit reference to the Geneva Conventions language and replace it with wording that captured substance of the prohibitions; for example, that humane treatment required provision of food, water, shelter, access to religious worship and a ban on torture.
The Senate could vote as early as Tuesday on yet another detainee issue, a proposal by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, to create an independent commission to investigate prisoner abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba.
Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company
November 7, 2005 latimes.com
EDITORIAL
Tortured justifications
THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF 9/11 killed nearly 3,000 Americans. With its response to those attacks, the Bush administration threatens the very idea of America.
The administration's attempt to exempt the CIA from a proposed law barring cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody is the latest instance of an assault on this country's values that began soon after 9/11. In some ways, such chiseling away of core American beliefs is more damaging than any terrorist attack, because it comes from within.
Last week's disclosure by the Washington Post that the CIA runs secret prisons in several Eastern European nations — sites where men can disappear indefinitely without charges or legal protection — provides more evidence that our nation's leaders are mocking our ideals.
The bar on cruel and inhumane treatment is part of the Geneva Convention, which the U.S. signed but which President Bush determined did not apply to terrorists, who wear no uniform and fight for no country. Alberto R. Gonzales, formerly Bush's legal counsel and now attorney general, soon after 9/11 derided the Geneva Convention as "quaint" and "obsolete." Although Bush has said detainees will not be tortured and will be treated humanely, the administration's definitions of those terms keep changing.
That's unacceptable. Military and CIA interrogators must be told what is allowed and what is not. Without clear guidelines, mistreatment or torture will continue. The rules should be the same at home and abroad, for soldiers and spies.
The argument that the U.S. should not heed the Geneva Convention because its enemies do not sets the stage for a race to the barbaric bottom. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was tortured during his 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, spoke eloquently on the fallacy of the "we'll do what they do" argument last month. He said all American POWs "knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them."
McCain engineered a 90-9 endorsement of his proposed law barring "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment" of any detainee held by the U.S. government. The law also would make interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual the standard for handling detainees in Defense Department custody. That would provide needed clarity to soldiers, who have seen colleagues mistreating inmates at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere.
The House has not yet approved the bill, but it should. The Senate attached McCain's anti-torture amendment to another bill on Friday, and McCain has vowed to keep attaching it to every piece of Senate legislation until it becomes law. If the president follows through on his threatened veto — which would be his first — the House and Senate should override him.
John Yoo, who served in the Justice Department's office of legal counsel when it produced its 2002 memo discussing how to define torture, wrote on the Op-Ed page of The Times last year: "Our system has a place for the discussion of morality and policy. Our elected and appointed officials must weigh these issues in deciding on how it will conduct interrogations. Ultimately, they must answer to the American people for their choices."
Those sentiments are even more valid a year later. It's now clear our leaders made some appalling choices. It's time they started answering for them.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-...ll=la-home-oped
EDITORIAL
Tortured justifications
THE TERRORIST ATTACKS OF 9/11 killed nearly 3,000 Americans. With its response to those attacks, the Bush administration threatens the very idea of America.
The administration's attempt to exempt the CIA from a proposed law barring cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody is the latest instance of an assault on this country's values that began soon after 9/11. In some ways, such chiseling away of core American beliefs is more damaging than any terrorist attack, because it comes from within.
Last week's disclosure by the Washington Post that the CIA runs secret prisons in several Eastern European nations — sites where men can disappear indefinitely without charges or legal protection — provides more evidence that our nation's leaders are mocking our ideals.
The bar on cruel and inhumane treatment is part of the Geneva Convention, which the U.S. signed but which President Bush determined did not apply to terrorists, who wear no uniform and fight for no country. Alberto R. Gonzales, formerly Bush's legal counsel and now attorney general, soon after 9/11 derided the Geneva Convention as "quaint" and "obsolete." Although Bush has said detainees will not be tortured and will be treated humanely, the administration's definitions of those terms keep changing.
That's unacceptable. Military and CIA interrogators must be told what is allowed and what is not. Without clear guidelines, mistreatment or torture will continue. The rules should be the same at home and abroad, for soldiers and spies.
The argument that the U.S. should not heed the Geneva Convention because its enemies do not sets the stage for a race to the barbaric bottom. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was tortured during his 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, spoke eloquently on the fallacy of the "we'll do what they do" argument last month. He said all American POWs "knew and took great strength from the belief that we were different from our enemies, that we were better than them, that we, if the roles were reversed, would not disgrace ourselves by committing or countenancing such mistreatment of them."
McCain engineered a 90-9 endorsement of his proposed law barring "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment" of any detainee held by the U.S. government. The law also would make interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual the standard for handling detainees in Defense Department custody. That would provide needed clarity to soldiers, who have seen colleagues mistreating inmates at Iraq's notorious Abu Ghraib prison and elsewhere.
The House has not yet approved the bill, but it should. The Senate attached McCain's anti-torture amendment to another bill on Friday, and McCain has vowed to keep attaching it to every piece of Senate legislation until it becomes law. If the president follows through on his threatened veto — which would be his first — the House and Senate should override him.
John Yoo, who served in the Justice Department's office of legal counsel when it produced its 2002 memo discussing how to define torture, wrote on the Op-Ed page of The Times last year: "Our system has a place for the discussion of morality and policy. Our elected and appointed officials must weigh these issues in deciding on how it will conduct interrogations. Ultimately, they must answer to the American people for their choices."
Those sentiments are even more valid a year later. It's now clear our leaders made some appalling choices. It's time they started answering for them.
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-...ll=la-home-oped
Tortured Truth
Bush says the U.S. doesn’t abuse detainees, but the evidence says otherwise
by James Ridgeway
November 7th, 2005 4:34 PM
Washington, D.C.--No sooner had President Bush told reporters on his stop in Panama that “[w]e do not torture" than the army announced it would prosecute five of its Rangers on charges of abusing detainees in Iraq, according to ABC News.
In Panama, President Bush said that he was fighting enemies who aimed to harm the U.S., but that he would carry on the fight “under the law.” He was responding to articles--the lead one appearing in last week’s Washington Post--that charged the CIA is running secret torture prisons in Eastern Europe.
Now ABC says the five members of the 75th Ranger regiment were charged Saturday for a September 7 incident "in which three detainees were allegedly punched and kicked while awaiting movement to a detention facility."
So maybe some of us do torture, but the rest of us will prosecute--and the plan is for everyone to benefit, suggested administration critic Larry Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell. In a remarkable November 3 interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, Wilkerson had this to say:
[I]t was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms--I’ll give you that--that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We’re not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and, oh, by the way, here’s some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.
The issue now dogs Bush wherever he goes. In Washington, the challenge is straightforward, contained in a lawsuit the Supreme Court will soon decide. The court, with new chief justice John Roberts sitting at its head, will hear a case dealing with the question of whether a former driver of Osama bin Laden, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, can be tried for war crimes before a military tribunal at Guantánamo. Oral arguments in the case are expected in March or April of next year. Reports the Christian Science Monitor:
"There are people who have been kept in Guantánamo so long that the situation just cries out for review," says Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and general counsel for the National Institute of Military Justice. "The world wants to know whether our judiciary thinks these things matter, and taking this case says it matters."
On Monday, the Washington Post said Vice President Dick Cheney has kept right on pushing for a free hand in dealing with detainees, even as the UN is asking European officials to look into the secret holding facilities. The paper revealed:
Just last week, Cheney showed up at a Republican senatorial luncheon to lobby lawmakers for a CIA exemption to an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The exemption would cover the CIA's covert "black sites" in several Eastern European democracies and other countries where key al Qaeda captives are being kept.
Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt declined to comment on the vice president's interventions or to elaborate on his positions. "The vice president's views are certainly reflected in the administration's policy," he said.
McCain has announced that he will continue adding a ban on torture by U.S. forces to big bills until he gets the measure through. “If necessary--and I sincerely hope it is not --I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails. Let no one doubt our determination,” McCain told the Senate.
http://villagevoice.com/news/0545,ridgeway118,69768,6.html
Bush says the U.S. doesn’t abuse detainees, but the evidence says otherwise
by James Ridgeway
November 7th, 2005 4:34 PM
Washington, D.C.--No sooner had President Bush told reporters on his stop in Panama that “[w]e do not torture" than the army announced it would prosecute five of its Rangers on charges of abusing detainees in Iraq, according to ABC News.
In Panama, President Bush said that he was fighting enemies who aimed to harm the U.S., but that he would carry on the fight “under the law.” He was responding to articles--the lead one appearing in last week’s Washington Post--that charged the CIA is running secret torture prisons in Eastern Europe.
Now ABC says the five members of the 75th Ranger regiment were charged Saturday for a September 7 incident "in which three detainees were allegedly punched and kicked while awaiting movement to a detention facility."
So maybe some of us do torture, but the rest of us will prosecute--and the plan is for everyone to benefit, suggested administration critic Larry Wilkerson, who served as chief of staff to former secretary of state Colin Powell. In a remarkable November 3 interview on NPR’s Morning Edition, Wilkerson had this to say:
[I]t was clear to me that there was a visible audit trail from the vice president’s office through the secretary of defense down to the commanders in the field that in carefully couched terms--I’ll give you that--that to a soldier in the field meant two things: We’re not getting enough good intelligence and you need to get that evidence, and, oh, by the way, here’s some ways you probably can get it. And even some of the ways that they detailed were not in accordance with the spirit of the Geneva Conventions and the law of war.
The issue now dogs Bush wherever he goes. In Washington, the challenge is straightforward, contained in a lawsuit the Supreme Court will soon decide. The court, with new chief justice John Roberts sitting at its head, will hear a case dealing with the question of whether a former driver of Osama bin Laden, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, can be tried for war crimes before a military tribunal at Guantánamo. Oral arguments in the case are expected in March or April of next year. Reports the Christian Science Monitor:
"There are people who have been kept in Guantánamo so long that the situation just cries out for review," says Stephen Saltzburg, a law professor at George Washington University and general counsel for the National Institute of Military Justice. "The world wants to know whether our judiciary thinks these things matter, and taking this case says it matters."
On Monday, the Washington Post said Vice President Dick Cheney has kept right on pushing for a free hand in dealing with detainees, even as the UN is asking European officials to look into the secret holding facilities. The paper revealed:
Just last week, Cheney showed up at a Republican senatorial luncheon to lobby lawmakers for a CIA exemption to an amendment by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) that would ban torture and inhumane treatment of prisoners. The exemption would cover the CIA's covert "black sites" in several Eastern European democracies and other countries where key al Qaeda captives are being kept.
Cheney spokesman Steve Schmidt declined to comment on the vice president's interventions or to elaborate on his positions. "The vice president's views are certainly reflected in the administration's policy," he said.
McCain has announced that he will continue adding a ban on torture by U.S. forces to big bills until he gets the measure through. “If necessary--and I sincerely hope it is not --I and the co-sponsors of this amendment will seek to add it to every piece of important legislation voted on in the Senate until the will of a substantial bipartisan majority in both houses of Congress prevails. Let no one doubt our determination,” McCain told the Senate.
http://villagevoice.com/news/0545,ridgeway118,69768,6.html
http://www.thenation.com/blogs/edcut?bid=7&pid=34031
BLOG | Posted 11/06/2005 @ 7:48pm
The Wrong Journalistic Decision
If one needed more reason to criticize the Washington Post's decision to withhold information, at the government's request, about the CIA's network of prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, read Jane Mayer's horrifying article in this week's New Yorker. In "A Deadly Interrogation," Mayer reports on the death by torture of an Iraqi terrorist suspect in the custody of the CIA. Jamadi died while being interrogated at Abu Ghraib by a CIA officer and a translator. His head had been covered by a plastic bag and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe. According to forensic pathologists interviewed by Mayer, Jamadi died of asphyxiation. But in a subsequent internal investigation, US government authorities classified his death as a homicide. Nevertheless, the CIA investigator has not been charged with a crime, and continues to work for the agency. Mayer reports he has been under investigation by the Justice Department for more than a year. (The CIA has reportedly been implicated in at least four deaths of detainees, and has referred eight potentially criminal cases to the Justice Department, Mayer reports. Yet, as she notes, the government has so far brought charges against only one-level contract employee.) It is a fantasy to believe that the architects of these cruel, inhuman interrogation techniques will be held accountable by an Administration whose key figures, especially "The Vice President for Torture," are so deeply implicated in the policies that led to the metastasizing use of torture.
What should not be overlooked is the historic significance of the Washington Post's decision. "This is probably the most important newspaper capitulation since the New York Times yielded to John F. Kennedy's call for them to not run the full story of planning for the Bay of Pigs," Peter Kornbluh, National Security Archive senior analyst, told Columbia Journalism Daily. "By withholding the country names, the Post is directly enabling the rendition, secret detention, and torture of prisoners at these locations to continue. That is a ghastly responsibility."
(In the interest of full disclosure, a reminder about The Nation's role in the reporting on CIA plans for the Bay of Pigs. When the New York Times acceded to Kennedy Administration requests to suppress its story, The Nation went ahead and alerted the country, in an article published on November 19, 1960, to an impending invasion. For this, the magazine was vilified. The New Republic, by the way, also suppressed its story about CIA plans for the invasion--at Kennedy's request.)
For more about the Washington Post's decision, and other recent cases in which news outlets have chosen to honor government requests for secrecy rather than the journalistic duty of informing the public about government wrongdoing, read Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting's valuable report, "The Consequences of Covering Up."
CLARIFICATION: Peter Kornbluh, Nation Security Archive Senior Analyst writes: "Dear Katrina, Thanks for including me in your blog which was forcefully done and well stated. I'm getting a lot of mileage out of that quote which started as a private email to the editor of CJR to try and get them to do a substantive story on the Washington Post decision.... I'm glad you've delved back into the proud history of the Nation's role in all that. But I'd like to clarify your chronology and history: The Nation published the first story on the Bay of Pigs training in Guatemala in November 1960 (before the plan was actually an invasion at the Bay of Pigs). Your article was called to the attention of a New York Times editor who then assigned Paul Kennedy to do a piece. He filed a story in January 1961 covering similar ground to yours. But it was the Tad Szulc story in the Times that ran only only a week before the invasion in April 1961 that Kennedy called the Times owner about and was able to get reduced in prominence and detail (since Tad knew essentially the time and place of the invasion.) Arthur Schlesinger told us later that he wished both the Times and New Republic had run their stories so that the whole catastrophe would have been avoided."
BLOG | Posted 11/06/2005 @ 7:48pm
The Wrong Journalistic Decision
If one needed more reason to criticize the Washington Post's decision to withhold information, at the government's request, about the CIA's network of prisons in Eastern Europe for suspected Al Qaeda terrorists, read Jane Mayer's horrifying article in this week's New Yorker. In "A Deadly Interrogation," Mayer reports on the death by torture of an Iraqi terrorist suspect in the custody of the CIA. Jamadi died while being interrogated at Abu Ghraib by a CIA officer and a translator. His head had been covered by a plastic bag and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe. According to forensic pathologists interviewed by Mayer, Jamadi died of asphyxiation. But in a subsequent internal investigation, US government authorities classified his death as a homicide. Nevertheless, the CIA investigator has not been charged with a crime, and continues to work for the agency. Mayer reports he has been under investigation by the Justice Department for more than a year. (The CIA has reportedly been implicated in at least four deaths of detainees, and has referred eight potentially criminal cases to the Justice Department, Mayer reports. Yet, as she notes, the government has so far brought charges against only one-level contract employee.) It is a fantasy to believe that the architects of these cruel, inhuman interrogation techniques will be held accountable by an Administration whose key figures, especially "The Vice President for Torture," are so deeply implicated in the policies that led to the metastasizing use of torture.
What should not be overlooked is the historic significance of the Washington Post's decision. "This is probably the most important newspaper capitulation since the New York Times yielded to John F. Kennedy's call for them to not run the full story of planning for the Bay of Pigs," Peter Kornbluh, National Security Archive senior analyst, told Columbia Journalism Daily. "By withholding the country names, the Post is directly enabling the rendition, secret detention, and torture of prisoners at these locations to continue. That is a ghastly responsibility."
(In the interest of full disclosure, a reminder about The Nation's role in the reporting on CIA plans for the Bay of Pigs. When the New York Times acceded to Kennedy Administration requests to suppress its story, The Nation went ahead and alerted the country, in an article published on November 19, 1960, to an impending invasion. For this, the magazine was vilified. The New Republic, by the way, also suppressed its story about CIA plans for the invasion--at Kennedy's request.)
For more about the Washington Post's decision, and other recent cases in which news outlets have chosen to honor government requests for secrecy rather than the journalistic duty of informing the public about government wrongdoing, read Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting's valuable report, "The Consequences of Covering Up."
CLARIFICATION: Peter Kornbluh, Nation Security Archive Senior Analyst writes: "Dear Katrina, Thanks for including me in your blog which was forcefully done and well stated. I'm getting a lot of mileage out of that quote which started as a private email to the editor of CJR to try and get them to do a substantive story on the Washington Post decision.... I'm glad you've delved back into the proud history of the Nation's role in all that. But I'd like to clarify your chronology and history: The Nation published the first story on the Bay of Pigs training in Guatemala in November 1960 (before the plan was actually an invasion at the Bay of Pigs). Your article was called to the attention of a New York Times editor who then assigned Paul Kennedy to do a piece. He filed a story in January 1961 covering similar ground to yours. But it was the Tad Szulc story in the Times that ran only only a week before the invasion in April 1961 that Kennedy called the Times owner about and was able to get reduced in prominence and detail (since Tad knew essentially the time and place of the invasion.) Arthur Schlesinger told us later that he wished both the Times and New Republic had run their stories so that the whole catastrophe would have been avoided."
November 8, 2005
Pentagon Plans Tighter Control of Interrogation
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - The Pentagon has approved a new policy directive governing interrogations as part of an effort to tighten controls over the questioning of terror suspects and other prisoners by American soldiers.
The eight-page directive, which was signed without any public announcement last Thursday by Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, will allow the Army to issue a long-delayed field manual for interrogators that is supposed to incorporate the lessons gleaned from the prisoner-abuse scandals last year.
The Army intends, for example, to ensure that interrogation techniques are approved, up to the highest levels in the Pentagon, that interrogators are properly trained and that personnel in the field are required to report any abuses, Army officials said.
Such changes have been under consideration since the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison were disclosed in April 2004, and reflect continuing problems with abuses by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq since then.
The Senate has approved a measure by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, i to ban abusive treatment of prisoners in American custody.
The new interrogations directive is also part of a wider effort by the Defense Department, which began last December, to review the treatment of prisoners in military custody.
A second directive, governing all aspects of prisoner detentions, not just interrogation methods, has caused sharp debate within the Bush administration. At issue is whether the Pentagon's broad guidelines on detention should include language from the Geneva Conventions barring the use of "cruel," "humiliating" and degrading treatment.
Some Pentagon officials said the interrogations directive was issued now in part to mollify critics in Congress, where new strictures on intelligence are being debated and where an amendment to a military spending bill by Mr. McCain would prohibit the use of cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners.
A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that the timing of the interrogations directive was unrelated to the initiatives on Capitol Hill and that the instruction consolidated and codified many procedures that had been put in place as a result of a dozen military investigations into prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"This directive provides the overarching Department of Defense policy that mandates humane treatment of detainees," Mr. Whitman said.
President Bush, in remarks in Panama City after meeting with President Martín Torrijos of Panama, sought to deflect recent reports of detainee mistreatment and secret interrogation sites around the world. "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people," Mr. Bush said. "Anything we do to that end, in that effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture."
The new Directive 3115.09, "DoD Intelligence Interrogations, Detainee Debriefings, and Tactical Questioning," assigns responsibilities for interrogation activities to senior Pentagon civilians and commanders; establishes requirements for reporting violations of the policy; and requires that Central Intelligence Agency interrogators follow Pentagon guidelines when questioning military prisoners.
It also reaffirms that military working dogs may not be used in interrogations and that military police may assist interrogators by providing information about detainees' behavior, but may not participate in the interrogations themselves.
"Acts of physical or mental torture are prohibited," says the directive, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. The policy directive does not elaborate other than to order that detainees be treated humanely "in accordance with applicable law and policy."
Approval of the interrogations policy now allows the Army to issue a new field manual on interrogations, which was largely completed months ago but has been delayed until the policy review was completed. "It will be released very shortly," said an Army policy maker, who like most officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity because the interrogations policy has not been publicly announced.
Army officials have said the new manual, the first revision in 13 years, incorporates safeguards devised to prevent the harsh techniques disclosed in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
Interrogation techniques sought by Army field commanders must be forwarded for review as high as the secretary of defense's office. All interrogators must be trained and certified as prepared to do the job.
One defense official said that parts of the manual were still vague and did not break any new ground in terms of acceptable interrogation techniques. The official said the field manual was an exceptionally important document for the Army, one that would not only guide the training of future interrogators but that would be scrutinized for how it incorporated the lessons of the abuse scandals that began with Abu Ghraib.
"There is a lot more that could have been done," the official said. "It could have been clearer." Army officials responded that the new manual, known as FM 2-22.3, would be accompanied by a separate classified training document providing dozens of interrogation situations and going into exacting detail on what procedures might and might not be used.
While Mr. England's approval of the interrogations directive advances that part of the overall policy, a fierce debate still embroils another major detention-policy document under revision, Directive 2310.01, "DoD program for Enemy Prisoners of War and Other Detainees."
Two department officials said that Vice President Dick Cheney's new chief of staff, David S. Addington, had continued to press senior Pentagon officials to eliminate language from the Geneva Conventions prohibiting "cruel," "humiliating," and "degrading" treatment. Other senior Pentagon and State Department officials, as well as military lawyers and the military's vice chiefs of staff support such language.
Mr. Cheney last Tuesday appealed to Republican senators in a private lunch meeting to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from similar language that is contained in Mr. McCain's provision.
The officials said they believed a compromise version of the contentious directive could eliminate an explicit reference to the Geneva Conventions language and replace it with wording that captured substance of the prohibitions; for example, that humane treatment required provision of food, water, shelter, access to religious worship and a ban on torture.
The Senate could vote as early as Tuesday on yet another detainee issue, a proposal by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, to create an independent commission to investigate prisoner abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba.
5 Rangers Are Charged
By The New York Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 7 - Five members of an Army Ranger unit have been charged with kicking and punching three detainees in Baghdad on Sept. 7, the military said on Monday. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said the five, from the 75th Ranger Regiment, had been charged with assault and maltreatment of prisoners and dereliction of duty. Reuters reported that Mr. Boyce declined to identify the soldiers.
Carl Hulse contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/politics...agewanted=print
Pentagon Plans Tighter Control of Interrogation
By ERIC SCHMITT and TIM GOLDEN
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - The Pentagon has approved a new policy directive governing interrogations as part of an effort to tighten controls over the questioning of terror suspects and other prisoners by American soldiers.
The eight-page directive, which was signed without any public announcement last Thursday by Acting Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon R. England, will allow the Army to issue a long-delayed field manual for interrogators that is supposed to incorporate the lessons gleaned from the prisoner-abuse scandals last year.
The Army intends, for example, to ensure that interrogation techniques are approved, up to the highest levels in the Pentagon, that interrogators are properly trained and that personnel in the field are required to report any abuses, Army officials said.
Such changes have been under consideration since the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison were disclosed in April 2004, and reflect continuing problems with abuses by troops in Afghanistan and Iraq since then.
The Senate has approved a measure by Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, i to ban abusive treatment of prisoners in American custody.
The new interrogations directive is also part of a wider effort by the Defense Department, which began last December, to review the treatment of prisoners in military custody.
A second directive, governing all aspects of prisoner detentions, not just interrogation methods, has caused sharp debate within the Bush administration. At issue is whether the Pentagon's broad guidelines on detention should include language from the Geneva Conventions barring the use of "cruel," "humiliating" and degrading treatment.
Some Pentagon officials said the interrogations directive was issued now in part to mollify critics in Congress, where new strictures on intelligence are being debated and where an amendment to a military spending bill by Mr. McCain would prohibit the use of cruel and degrading treatment of prisoners.
A Pentagon spokesman, Bryan Whitman, said that the timing of the interrogations directive was unrelated to the initiatives on Capitol Hill and that the instruction consolidated and codified many procedures that had been put in place as a result of a dozen military investigations into prisoner abuse in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
"This directive provides the overarching Department of Defense policy that mandates humane treatment of detainees," Mr. Whitman said.
President Bush, in remarks in Panama City after meeting with President Martín Torrijos of Panama, sought to deflect recent reports of detainee mistreatment and secret interrogation sites around the world. "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people," Mr. Bush said. "Anything we do to that end, in that effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture."
The new Directive 3115.09, "DoD Intelligence Interrogations, Detainee Debriefings, and Tactical Questioning," assigns responsibilities for interrogation activities to senior Pentagon civilians and commanders; establishes requirements for reporting violations of the policy; and requires that Central Intelligence Agency interrogators follow Pentagon guidelines when questioning military prisoners.
It also reaffirms that military working dogs may not be used in interrogations and that military police may assist interrogators by providing information about detainees' behavior, but may not participate in the interrogations themselves.
"Acts of physical or mental torture are prohibited," says the directive, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times. The policy directive does not elaborate other than to order that detainees be treated humanely "in accordance with applicable law and policy."
Approval of the interrogations policy now allows the Army to issue a new field manual on interrogations, which was largely completed months ago but has been delayed until the policy review was completed. "It will be released very shortly," said an Army policy maker, who like most officials interviewed for this article spoke on condition of anonymity because the interrogations policy has not been publicly announced.
Army officials have said the new manual, the first revision in 13 years, incorporates safeguards devised to prevent the harsh techniques disclosed in the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal.
Interrogation techniques sought by Army field commanders must be forwarded for review as high as the secretary of defense's office. All interrogators must be trained and certified as prepared to do the job.
One defense official said that parts of the manual were still vague and did not break any new ground in terms of acceptable interrogation techniques. The official said the field manual was an exceptionally important document for the Army, one that would not only guide the training of future interrogators but that would be scrutinized for how it incorporated the lessons of the abuse scandals that began with Abu Ghraib.
"There is a lot more that could have been done," the official said. "It could have been clearer." Army officials responded that the new manual, known as FM 2-22.3, would be accompanied by a separate classified training document providing dozens of interrogation situations and going into exacting detail on what procedures might and might not be used.
While Mr. England's approval of the interrogations directive advances that part of the overall policy, a fierce debate still embroils another major detention-policy document under revision, Directive 2310.01, "DoD program for Enemy Prisoners of War and Other Detainees."
Two department officials said that Vice President Dick Cheney's new chief of staff, David S. Addington, had continued to press senior Pentagon officials to eliminate language from the Geneva Conventions prohibiting "cruel," "humiliating," and "degrading" treatment. Other senior Pentagon and State Department officials, as well as military lawyers and the military's vice chiefs of staff support such language.
Mr. Cheney last Tuesday appealed to Republican senators in a private lunch meeting to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from similar language that is contained in Mr. McCain's provision.
The officials said they believed a compromise version of the contentious directive could eliminate an explicit reference to the Geneva Conventions language and replace it with wording that captured substance of the prohibitions; for example, that humane treatment required provision of food, water, shelter, access to religious worship and a ban on torture.
The Senate could vote as early as Tuesday on yet another detainee issue, a proposal by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, to create an independent commission to investigate prisoner abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba.
5 Rangers Are Charged
By The New York Times
BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 7 - Five members of an Army Ranger unit have been charged with kicking and punching three detainees in Baghdad on Sept. 7, the military said on Monday. Paul Boyce, an Army spokesman, said the five, from the 75th Ranger Regiment, had been charged with assault and maltreatment of prisoners and dereliction of duty. Reuters reported that Mr. Boyce declined to identify the soldiers.
Carl Hulse contributed reporting for this article.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/politics...agewanted=print
November 8, 2005
Pentagon Charges 5 More in Guantánamo Bay Camp
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - Within hours of the Supreme Court decision on Monday to consider the legality of special military commissions to try detainees for war crimes, the Defense Department announced that it had brought charges against an additional five prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The announcement brings to nine the total of detainees at Guantánamo who are facing war crimes charges under the military commission system. The newly charged detainees include Omar Ahmed Khadr, 19, a Canadian accused of throwing a grenade that killed an American medic, Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer, near Khost, Afghanistan.
Mr. Khadr's case is well known because his lawyers have said that he was mistreated at Guantánamo and that his initial capture and detention when he was 15 violated United States obligations under treaties on treating young people in wartime.
The charges against Mr. Khadr say that his father was a close friend of Osama bin Laden and that he, too, was acquainted with Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader.
Mr. Khadr is the only one of the newly charged detainees to face a murder charge that could bring the death penalty. The other four new defendants, identified by the Pentagon as Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi and Jabran Said bin al-Qahtani, both of Saudi Arabia; Sufyian Barhoumi of Algeria; and Binyam Ahmed Muhammed of Ethiopia, are charged with conspiracy to commit murder and terrorism.
The trials of the initial four defendants began in August 2004 in a courtroom fashioned out of a former dental clinic. They were halted three months later when a federal district judge ruled that the new system was inadequate under domestic and international laws.
That ruling was overturned, and the Pentagon has been planning to resume the trials, which would be the first war crimes trials held by the United States since the end of World War II. A spokesman for the Pentagon, Maj. Michael Shavers, said the Supreme Court ruling had not affected the intention to proceed with a planned session before a commission this month.
But a federal judge who is considering other issues related to the defendant in that case, David Hicks, an Australian charged with fighting with the Taliban, is considering whether to stay those proceedings, a senior lawyer for the Justice Department lawyer, said.
The decision to review the legality of the military commissions is the latest in a long series of rulings that followed the Pentagon decision to set up a detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. Senior administration lawyers had believed that Guantánamo would be, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld once put it, "the least worst place" for such a camp. They thought it would be not only secure but also beyond the reach of American courts because the American naval base there is on the southeastern tip of Cuba and not part of the United States. It has been leased in perpetuity from Cuba since 1903, at first for use as a coaling station.
The detainee population at Guantánamo rose to 750 but is now about 500, the authorities said Monday. The detainees are housed mostly in a camp made of corrugated shacks and trailers, and their prolonged detention has produced many complaints from human rights groups.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the lone such group allowed to visit all the prisoners, said in October 2003 that the prolonged detention was unacceptable and was damaging the mental health of many inmates. Last fall, Red Cross sent the United States government confidential reports that the handling and questioning at Guantánamo amounted to torture.
The military vigorously objected to the characterizations, but accounts of former interrogators and the disclosure of confidential e-mail messages from Federal Bureau of Investigation agents assigned to Guantánamo asserted that abuse of the detainees was widespread and severe.
In June 2004, the Supreme Court upset the administration's stance that Guantánamo was beyond the reach of American law when it ruled that the detainees had the right to challenge their detentions in federal courts. That ruling has brought scores of lawyers to Guantánamo to visit prisoners they represent.
That has in turn produced an alternative source of information as to what occurs there, often at odds with the military account.
In recent months, many detainees have conducted hunger strikes to protest conditions and their prolonged confinement without trial, according to the accounts of lawyers who represent them.
A spokesman for the military command at Guantánamo said that 27 detainees were participating in a hunger strike and that 23 of them were being fed with nasal tubes in the camp hospital. The spokesman, Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, said the prisoners were not restrained for what the military calls assisted feeding.
Some lawyers have filed pleadings in federal court asserting that their clients are forcibly fed and have been injured by having feeding tubes roughly inserted through their noses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/politics...agewanted=print
Pentagon Charges 5 More in Guantánamo Bay Camp
By NEIL A. LEWIS
WASHINGTON, Nov. 7 - Within hours of the Supreme Court decision on Monday to consider the legality of special military commissions to try detainees for war crimes, the Defense Department announced that it had brought charges against an additional five prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The announcement brings to nine the total of detainees at Guantánamo who are facing war crimes charges under the military commission system. The newly charged detainees include Omar Ahmed Khadr, 19, a Canadian accused of throwing a grenade that killed an American medic, Sgt. First Class Christopher Speer, near Khost, Afghanistan.
Mr. Khadr's case is well known because his lawyers have said that he was mistreated at Guantánamo and that his initial capture and detention when he was 15 violated United States obligations under treaties on treating young people in wartime.
The charges against Mr. Khadr say that his father was a close friend of Osama bin Laden and that he, too, was acquainted with Mr. bin Laden, the Qaeda leader.
Mr. Khadr is the only one of the newly charged detainees to face a murder charge that could bring the death penalty. The other four new defendants, identified by the Pentagon as Ghassan Abdullah al-Sharbi and Jabran Said bin al-Qahtani, both of Saudi Arabia; Sufyian Barhoumi of Algeria; and Binyam Ahmed Muhammed of Ethiopia, are charged with conspiracy to commit murder and terrorism.
The trials of the initial four defendants began in August 2004 in a courtroom fashioned out of a former dental clinic. They were halted three months later when a federal district judge ruled that the new system was inadequate under domestic and international laws.
That ruling was overturned, and the Pentagon has been planning to resume the trials, which would be the first war crimes trials held by the United States since the end of World War II. A spokesman for the Pentagon, Maj. Michael Shavers, said the Supreme Court ruling had not affected the intention to proceed with a planned session before a commission this month.
But a federal judge who is considering other issues related to the defendant in that case, David Hicks, an Australian charged with fighting with the Taliban, is considering whether to stay those proceedings, a senior lawyer for the Justice Department lawyer, said.
The decision to review the legality of the military commissions is the latest in a long series of rulings that followed the Pentagon decision to set up a detention camp at Guantánamo Bay. Senior administration lawyers had believed that Guantánamo would be, as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld once put it, "the least worst place" for such a camp. They thought it would be not only secure but also beyond the reach of American courts because the American naval base there is on the southeastern tip of Cuba and not part of the United States. It has been leased in perpetuity from Cuba since 1903, at first for use as a coaling station.
The detainee population at Guantánamo rose to 750 but is now about 500, the authorities said Monday. The detainees are housed mostly in a camp made of corrugated shacks and trailers, and their prolonged detention has produced many complaints from human rights groups.
The International Committee of the Red Cross, the lone such group allowed to visit all the prisoners, said in October 2003 that the prolonged detention was unacceptable and was damaging the mental health of many inmates. Last fall, Red Cross sent the United States government confidential reports that the handling and questioning at Guantánamo amounted to torture.
The military vigorously objected to the characterizations, but accounts of former interrogators and the disclosure of confidential e-mail messages from Federal Bureau of Investigation agents assigned to Guantánamo asserted that abuse of the detainees was widespread and severe.
In June 2004, the Supreme Court upset the administration's stance that Guantánamo was beyond the reach of American law when it ruled that the detainees had the right to challenge their detentions in federal courts. That ruling has brought scores of lawyers to Guantánamo to visit prisoners they represent.
That has in turn produced an alternative source of information as to what occurs there, often at odds with the military account.
In recent months, many detainees have conducted hunger strikes to protest conditions and their prolonged confinement without trial, according to the accounts of lawyers who represent them.
A spokesman for the military command at Guantánamo said that 27 detainees were participating in a hunger strike and that 23 of them were being fed with nasal tubes in the camp hospital. The spokesman, Lt. Col. Jeremy Martin, said the prisoners were not restrained for what the military calls assisted feeding.
Some lawyers have filed pleadings in federal court asserting that their clients are forcibly fed and have been injured by having feeding tubes roughly inserted through their noses.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/politics...agewanted=print
QUOTE
The Senate could vote as early as Tuesday on yet another detainee issue, a proposal by Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, to create an independent commission to investigate prisoner abuses in Iraq, Afghanistan and Cuba.
Bravo Senator Levin!
Look at these two exerpts from this Nov. 6 Jehl article about a prisoner named al-libi
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/politics...artner=homepage
Now read this exerpt about al-libi that came from a November 7 article by
Strobel and Kuhnhenn that appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...cs/13106865.htm
I think it is pretty obvious from these two articles that al-libi told his torturers whatever they wanted to hear. And the Bush adminstration then used that bogus information that came from the torture of al-libi to try to help justify a war with Iraq (even after they knew it was not accurate).
So the next time some fool wants to tell you that we need the ability to torture so that we can obtain intelligence information you might want to tell them about al-libi
The al-libi case also begs the question of why Cheney is still lobbying to exempt the CIA from the McCain amendment. After all his big argument for the exemption has been that they need all options open to them in order to obtain intel to protect the American people. Seems to me that the al-libi case pretty much cuts the heart out of Cheney's argument. And whats more, he already knows it, just like they knew al-libi's intel was bogus when they used it to help justify going to war.
Looks to me like both al-libi and Libby have unknowlingly helped to unmask the unethical and possibly criminal behavior of this White House. One of them was tortured and the other just made a tortured effort to hide the truth.
.
QUOTE
November 6, 2005
Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.
Report Warned Bush Team About Intelligence Doubts
By DOUGLAS JEHL
WASHINGTON, Nov. 5 — A top member of Al Qaeda in American custody was identified as a likely fabricator months before the Bush administration began to use his statements as the foundation for its claims that Iraq trained Al Qaeda members to use biological and chemical weapons, according to newly declassified portions of a Defense Intelligence Agency document.
QUOTE
Mr. Libi, who was captured in Pakistan at the end of 2001, recanted his claims in January 2004. That prompted the C.I.A., a month later, to recall all intelligence reports based on his statements, a fact recorded in a footnote to the report issued by the Sept. 11 commission
. http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/06/politics...artner=homepage
Now read this exerpt about al-libi that came from a November 7 article by
Strobel and Kuhnhenn that appeared in the San Jose Mercury News.
QUOTE
Finally, intelligence and military officers argue that abuse and torture are likely to produce bogus intelligence because prisoners will say whatever they think their interrogators want to hear to stop the abuse.
For example, said one U.S. intelligence official, al-Qaida training camp commander Ibn Sheikh al-Libi gave his interrogators bogus information about links between Iraq and al-Qaida after the CIA turned him over to Egyptian authorities for questioning. "The Egyptians aren't known for their gentle treatment of terrorists," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is classified.
For example, said one U.S. intelligence official, al-Qaida training camp commander Ibn Sheikh al-Libi gave his interrogators bogus information about links between Iraq and al-Qaida after the CIA turned him over to Egyptian authorities for questioning. "The Egyptians aren't known for their gentle treatment of terrorists," the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the matter is classified.
http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews...cs/13106865.htm
I think it is pretty obvious from these two articles that al-libi told his torturers whatever they wanted to hear. And the Bush adminstration then used that bogus information that came from the torture of al-libi to try to help justify a war with Iraq (even after they knew it was not accurate).
So the next time some fool wants to tell you that we need the ability to torture so that we can obtain intelligence information you might want to tell them about al-libi
The al-libi case also begs the question of why Cheney is still lobbying to exempt the CIA from the McCain amendment. After all his big argument for the exemption has been that they need all options open to them in order to obtain intel to protect the American people. Seems to me that the al-libi case pretty much cuts the heart out of Cheney's argument. And whats more, he already knows it, just like they knew al-libi's intel was bogus when they used it to help justify going to war.
Looks to me like both al-libi and Libby have unknowlingly helped to unmask the unethical and possibly criminal behavior of this White House. One of them was tortured and the other just made a tortured effort to hide the truth.
.
QUOTE(Magmak1 @ Nov 3 2005, 11:16 AM)
We should ask our Congressmen to sponsor a bill that seeks to change the national seal... you know, the one with the eagle with an olive branch and arrows in its claws.. to one in which the eagle is hooded in black leather, and carries a whip and a cattle prod.
Don't change the NATIONAL seal......just the presidential and vice-presidential ones.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051107/ap_on_...wh/bush_torture
Bush Declares: 'We Do Not Torture' By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
Mon Nov 7, 6:16 PM ET
President Bush on Monday defended U.S. interrogation practices and called the treatment of terrorism suspects lawful. "We do not torture," Bush declared in response to reports of secret CIA prisons overseas.
Bush supported an effort spearheaded by Vice President Dick Cheney to block or modify a proposed Senate-passed ban on torture.
"We're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible, more possible, to do our job," Bush said. "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet we will aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law."
Cheney is seeking to persuade Congress to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from the proposed torture ban if one is passed by both chambers.
Bush spoke at a news conference with Panamanian President Martin Torrijos on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider a challenge to the administration's military tribunals for foreign terror suspects.
In a case entailing a major test of the government's wartime powers, justices will decide whether Osama bin Laden's former driver can be tried for war crimes before military officers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, U.S. military forces have held hundreds of suspects at known installations outside the United States, including at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.
On Monday, the Pentagon announced that five additional terror suspects at Guantanamo will face military trials on various charges including attacking civilians and murder. That brought to nine out of about 500 detainees at the facility who have been charged with criminal offenses.
Bush was asked about reports that the CIA was separately maintaining secret prisons in eastern Europe and Asia to interrogate al-Qaida suspects — and demands by the International Red Cross for access to them.
Without confirming or denying the existence of such prisons, Bush said, "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people."
He pointedly noted that Congress shares that responsibility with the administration.
"We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do ... to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture," Bush said.
The European Union is investigating reports of the CIA prisons. The story was first reported by The Washington Post.
In Washington, Senate Democrats pressed for the creation of an independent commission to investigate detainee abuse. They hope to attach the proposal to a defense bill the Senate is considering this week.
"We need a 9/11-type commission to restore credibility to this nation," said Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.
Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., called the commission unnecessary. "Responsibility and accountability have been assessed," Warner said, echoing Pentagon arguments that it had already done a dozen major investigations into prisoner-abuse allegations.
But Levin said there are areas that have not been reviewed, such as the CIA's interrogation of prisoners, the exporting of prisoners to countries that engage in torture, and the role contractors play in interrogations.
Separately, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., said Bush's comments in Panama, combined with Cheney's efforts to exempt the CIA from the torture ban, "only demonstrate that the White House learned nothing from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."
"This administration has consistently sought legal justifications for harsh techniques," Kennedy said.
The United States drew worldwide condemnation after photographs circulated showing guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad mistreating and humiliating prisoners.
Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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Bush Declares: 'We Do Not Torture' By DEB RIECHMANN, Associated Press Writer
Mon Nov 7, 6:16 PM ET
President Bush on Monday defended U.S. interrogation practices and called the treatment of terrorism suspects lawful. "We do not torture," Bush declared in response to reports of secret CIA prisons overseas.
Bush supported an effort spearheaded by Vice President Dick Cheney to block or modify a proposed Senate-passed ban on torture.
"We're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible, more possible, to do our job," Bush said. "There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet we will aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law."
Cheney is seeking to persuade Congress to exempt the Central Intelligence Agency from the proposed torture ban if one is passed by both chambers.
Bush spoke at a news conference with Panamanian President Martin Torrijos on the same day the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to consider a challenge to the administration's military tribunals for foreign terror suspects.
In a case entailing a major test of the government's wartime powers, justices will decide whether Osama bin Laden's former driver can be tried for war crimes before military officers in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, U.S. military forces have held hundreds of suspects at known installations outside the United States, including at the Guantanamo Bay naval base.
On Monday, the Pentagon announced that five additional terror suspects at Guantanamo will face military trials on various charges including attacking civilians and murder. That brought to nine out of about 500 detainees at the facility who have been charged with criminal offenses.
Bush was asked about reports that the CIA was separately maintaining secret prisons in eastern Europe and Asia to interrogate al-Qaida suspects — and demands by the International Red Cross for access to them.
Without confirming or denying the existence of such prisons, Bush said, "Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people."
He pointedly noted that Congress shares that responsibility with the administration.
"We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do ... to that end in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture," Bush said.
The European Union is investigating reports of the CIA prisons. The story was first reported by The Washington Post.
In Washington, Senate Democrats pressed for the creation of an independent commission to investigate detainee abuse. They hope to attach the proposal to a defense bill the Senate is considering this week.
"We need a 9/11-type commission to restore credibility to this nation," said Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, the senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee.
Committee Chairman John Warner, R-Va., called the commission unnecessary. "Responsibility and accountability have been assessed," Warner said, echoing Pentagon arguments that it had already done a dozen major investigations into prisoner-abuse allegations.
But Levin said there are areas that have not been reviewed, such as the CIA's interrogation of prisoners, the exporting of prisoners to countries that engage in torture, and the role contractors play in interrogations.
Separately, Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (news, bio, voting record), D-Mass., said Bush's comments in Panama, combined with Cheney's efforts to exempt the CIA from the torture ban, "only demonstrate that the White House learned nothing from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo."
"This administration has consistently sought legal justifications for harsh techniques," Kennedy said.
The United States drew worldwide condemnation after photographs circulated showing guards at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad mistreating and humiliating prisoners.
Copyright © 2005 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information contained in the AP News report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press.
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A DEADLY INTERROGATION
by JANE MAYER
Can the C.I.A. legally kill a prisoner?
Issue of 2005-11-14
Posted 2005-11-07
At the end of a secluded cul-de-sac, in a fast-growing Virginia suburb favored by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a handsome replica of an old-fashioned farmhouse, with a white-railed front porch. The large back yard has a swimming pool, which, on a recent October afternoon, was neatly covered. In the driveway were two cars, a late-model truck, and an all-terrain vehicle. The sole discordant note was struck by a faded American flag on the porch; instead of fluttering in the autumn breeze, it was folded on a heap of old Christmas ornaments.
The house belongs to Mark Swanner, a forty-six-year-old C.I.A. officer who has performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency, which has employed him at least since the nineteen-nineties. (He is not a covert operative.) Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in Swanner’s custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,” meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency.
After September 11th, the Justice Department fashioned secret legal guidelines that appear to indemnify C.I.A. officials who perform aggressive, even violent interrogations outside the United States. Techniques such as waterboarding—the near-drowning of a suspect—have been implicitly authorized by an Administration that feels that such methods may be necessary to win the war on terrorism. (In 2001, Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an interview on “Meet the Press,” said that the government might have to go to “the dark side” in handling terrorist suspects, adding, “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.”) The harsh treatment of Jamadi and other prisoners in C.I.A. custody, however, has inspired an emotional debate in Washington, raising questions about what limits should be placed on agency officials who interrogate foreign terrorist suspects outside U.S. territory.
This fall, in response to the exposure of widespread prisoner abuse at American detention facilities abroad—among them Abu Ghraib; Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba; and Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan—John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, introduced a bill in Congress that would require Americans holding prisoners abroad to follow the same standards of humane treatment required at home by the U.S. Constitution. Prisoners must not be brutalized, the bill states, regardless of their “nationality or physical location.” On October 5th, in a rebuke to President Bush, who strongly opposed McCain’s proposal, the Senate voted 90–9 in favor of it.
Senior Administration officials have led a fierce, and increasingly visible, fight to protect the C.I.A.’s classified interrogation protocol. Late last month, Cheney and Porter Goss, the C.I.A. director, had an unusual forty-five-minute private meeting on Capitol Hill with Senator McCain, who was tortured as a P.O.W. during the Vietnam War. They argued that the C.I.A. sometimes needs the “flexibility” to treat detainees in the war on terrorism in “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” ways. Cheney sought to add an exemption to McCain’s bill, permitting brutal methods when “such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack.” A Washington Post editorial decried Cheney’s visit, calling him the “Vice-President for Torture.” In the coming weeks, a conference committee of the House and the Senate will decide whether McCain’s proposal becomes law; three of the nine senators who voted against the measure are on the committee.
The outcome of this wider political debate may play a role in determining the fate of Swanner, whose name has not been publicly disclosed before, and who declined several requests to be interviewed. Passage of the McCain legislation by both Houses of Congress would mean that there is strong political opposition to the abusive treatment of prisoners, and would put increased pressure on the Justice Department to prosecute interrogators like Swanner—who could conceivably be charged with assault, negligent manslaughter, or torture. Swanner’s lawyer, Nina Ginsberg, declined to discuss his case on the record. But he has been under investigation by the Justice Department for more than a year.
Manadel al-Jamadi was captured by Navy SEALs at 2 a.m. on November 4, 2003, after a violent struggle at his house, outside Baghdad. Jamadi savagely fought one of the SEALs before being subdued in his kitchen; during the altercation, his stove fell on them. The C.I.A. had identified him as a “high-value” target, because he had allegedly supplied the explosives used in several atrocities perpetrated by insurgents, including the bombing of the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, in October, 2003. After being removed from his house, Jamadi was manhandled by several of the SEALs, who gave him a black eye and a cut on his face; he was then transferred to C.I.A. custody, for interrogation at Abu Ghraib. According to witnesses, Jamadi was walking and speaking when he arrived at the prison. He was taken to a shower room for interrogation. Some forty-five minutes later, he was dead.
For most of the time that Jamadi was being interrogated at Abu Ghraib, there were only two people in the room with him. One was an Arabic-speaking translator for the C.I.A. working on a private contract, who has been identified in military-court papers only as “Clint C.” He was given immunity against criminal prosecution in exchange for his coöperation. The other person was Mark Swanner.
In the spring of 2004, the fact of pervasive prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib became public, on “60 Minutes II” and in a series of articles in these pages by Seymour M. Hersh. Photographs, taken by U.S. soldiers, that showed Iraqi prisoners being hooded, sexually humiliated, and threatened with dogs were published around the world. One of the most harrowing images was of Jamadi’s severely battered corpse, which had been wrapped in plastic and put on ice; he became known in the media as the Ice Man.
Around this time, John Helgerson, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, sent investigators to Iraq and San Diego to interview witnesses about the agency’s role in Jamadi’s death. These investigators determined that there was the possibility of criminality—the threshold level required by the intelligence agency in order for the case to be referred to the Justice Department. The agency did so, and officials in the Justice Department then forwarded the case to the office of Paul McNulty, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, which has jurisdiction over C.I.A. headquarters. The dossier has been there for more than a year. A lawyer familiar with the case, who asked not to be named, said that the Swanner file seemed to be “lying kind of fallow.”
A spokeswoman for McNulty said that he would have no comment on the case, because it was still under investigation. (Last month, President Bush nominated McNulty to the position of Deputy Attorney General, the second most powerful job in the Justice Department.) No other official in the Justice Department would discuss on the record why, more than two years after Jamadi’s death, no decision has been made about pressing charges against anyone.
A government official familiar with the case, who declined to be named, indicated that establishing guilt in the case might be complicated, because of Jamadi’s rough handling by the SEALs before he entered the custody of the C.I.A. Yet, in the past two years, several of the Navy SEALs who captured Jamadi and delivered him to C.I.A. officials have faced abuse charges in military-justice proceedings, and have been exonerated. Moreover, three medical experts who have examined Jamadi’s case told me that the injuries he sustained from the SEALs could not have caused his death.
Fred Hitz, who served as the C.I.A.’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, and who is now a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University, said of Bush Administration officials, “I just think they’re playing stall ball.” He told me that he had no inside knowledge of the Swanner case, but he believes that, for numerous reasons, ranging from protecting national security to avoiding political embarrassment, Administration officials “would be opposed to any accountability in this case. They want it to disappear off the screen.” (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said that its internal investigation into Jamadi’s death was “nearly complete,” making it “inappropriate to discuss any of the details.”)
John Radsan, a lawyer formerly in the C.I.A’s Office of General Counsel, says, “Along with the usual problems of dealing with classified information in a criminal case, this could open a can of worms if a C.I.A. official in this case got indicted—a big fat can of worms about what set of rules apply to people like Jamadi. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is: What has been authorized? Can the C.I.A. torture people? A case like this opens up Pandora’s box.”
Since September 11, 2001, the C.I.A.’s treatment and interrogation of terrorist suspects has remained almost entirely hidden from public view. Human-rights groups estimate that some ten thousand foreign suspects are being held in U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and other countries. A small but unknown part of this population is in the custody of the C.I.A., which, as Dana Priest reported recently in the Washington Post, has operated secret prisons in Thailand and in Eastern Europe. It is also unclear how seriously the agency deals with allegations of prisoner abuse. The C.I.A. tends to be careful about following strict legal procedures, including the briefing of the top-ranking members of the congressional intelligence committees on its covert activities. But experts could recall no instance of a C.I.A. officer being tried in a public courtroom for manslaughter or murder. Thomas Powers, the author of two books about the C.I.A., told me, “I’ve never heard of anyone at the C.I.A. being convicted of a killing.” He added that a case such as Jamadi’s had awkward political implications. “Is the C.I.A. capable of addressing an illegal killing by its own hands?” he asked. “My guess is not.” Whereas the military has subjected itself to a dozen internal investigations in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, and has punished more than two hundred soldiers for wrongdoing, the agency has undertaken almost no public self-examination.
The C.I.A. has reportedly been implicated in at least four deaths of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, including that of Jamadi, and has referred eight potentially criminal cases involving abuse and misconduct to the Justice Department. In March, Goss, the C.I.A.’s director, testified before Congress that “we don’t do torture,” and the agency’s press office issued a release stating, “All approved interrogation techniques, both past and present, are lawful and do not constitute torture. . . . C.I.A. policies on interrogation have always followed legal guidance from the Department of Justice. If an individual violates the policy, then he or she will be held accountable.”
Yet the government has brought charges against only one person affiliated with the agency: David Passaro, a low-level contract employee, not a full-fledged C.I.A. officer. In 2003, Passaro, while interrogating an Afghan prisoner, allegedly beat him with a flashlight so severely that he eventually died from his injuries. In two other incidents of prisoner abuse, the Times reported last month, charges probably will not be brought against C.I.A. personnel: the 2003 case of an Iraqi prisoner who was forced head first into a sleeping bag, then beaten; and the 2002 abuse of an Afghan prisoner who froze to death after being stripped and chained to the floor of a concrete cell. (The C.I.A. supervisor involved in the latter case was subsequently promoted.)
One reason these C.I.A. officials may not be facing charges is that, in recent years, the Justice Department has established a strikingly narrow definition of torture. In August, 2002, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel sent a memo on interrogations to the White House, which argued that a coercive technique was torture only when it induced pain equivalent to what a person experiencing death or organ failure might suffer. By implication, all lesser forms of physical and psychological mistreatment—what critics have called “torture lite”—were legal. The memo also said that torture was illegal only when it could be proved that the interrogator intended to cause the required level of pain. And it provided interrogators with another large exemption: torture might be acceptable if an interrogator was acting in accordance with military “necessity.” A source familiar with the memo’s origins, who declined to speak on the record, said that it “was written as an immunity, a blank check.” In 2004, the “torture memo,” as it became known, was leaked, complicating the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be Attorney General; as White House counsel, Gonzales had approved the memo. The Administration subsequently revised the guidelines, using language that seemed more restrictive. But a little-noticed footnote protected the coercive methods permitted by the “torture memo,” stating that they did not violate the “standards set forth in this memorandum.”
The Bush Administration has resisted disclosing the contents of two Justice Department memos that established a detailed interrogation policy for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. A March, 2003, classified memo was “breathtaking,” the same source said. The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated. Another classified Justice Department memo, issued in August, 2002, is said to authorize numerous “enhanced” interrogation techniques for the C.I.A. These two memos sanction such extreme measures that, even if the agency wanted to discipline or prosecute agents who stray beyond its own comfort level, the legal tools to do so may no longer exist. Like the torture memo, these documents are believed to have been signed by Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, but written by a Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, who is now a professor of law at Berkeley.
For nearly a year, Democratic senators critical of alleged abuses have been demanding to see these memos. “We need to know what was authorized,” Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, told me. “Was it waterboarding? The use of dogs? Stripping detainees? . . . The refusal to give us these documents is totally inexcusable.” Levin is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to have an oversight role in relation to the C.I.A. “The Administration is getting away with just saying no,” he went on. “There’s no claim of executive privilege. There’s no claim of national security—we’ve offered to keep it classified. It’s just "expletive deleted". They just don’t want us to know what they’re doing, or have done.”
By the summer of 2003, the insurgency against the U.S. occupation of Iraq had grown into a confounding and lethal insurrection, and the Pentagon and the White House were pressing C.I.A. agents and members of the Special Forces to get the kind of intelligence needed to crush it. On orders from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, General Geoffrey Miller, who had overseen coercive interrogations of terrorist suspects at Guantánamo, imposed similar methods at Abu Ghraib. In October of that year, however—a month before Jamadi’s death—the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating that Iraqi insurgents were covered by the Geneva Conventions, which require the humane treatment of prisoners and forbid coercive interrogations. The ruling reversed an earlier interpretation, which had concluded, erroneously, that Iraqi insurgents were not protected by international law.
As a result of these contradictory mandates from Washington, the rules of engagement at Abu Ghraib became muddy, and the tactics grew increasingly ad hoc. Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the C.I.A., told me, “Abu Ghraib has its roots at the top. I think this uncertainty about who was and who was not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and all this talk that they’re all terrorists, bred the climate in which this kind of abuse takes place.”
At Abu Ghraib, the confusion over interrogation and detention methods was compounded by the fact that C.I.A. officials worked side by side with U.S. military people. Colonel Janis Karpinski, a former commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which oversaw the administration of Abu Ghraib during the period of widespread abuse, has said that C.I.A. officers, along with contract interpreters and some military-intelligence officers, did not wear uniforms when they visited the prison, and it was not clear, even to her, what they were doing there. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians I didn’t know,” she told Seymour Hersh. “I called them disappearing ghosts. . . . They were always bringing in somebody for interrogation, or waiting to collect somebody going out.” C.I.A. officials, unlike members of the Army and the Navy, are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibits “cruelty toward, or oppression or maltreatment of” prisoners.
Walter Diaz, a military policeman, was on guard duty at Abu Ghraib the morning that Jamadi was delivered to the prison. He told me, “The O.G.A.”— “other government agencies,” initials commonly used to protect the identity of the C.I.A.—“would bring in people all the time to interview them. We had one wing, Tier One Alpha, reserved for the O.G.A. They’d have maybe twenty people there at a time.” He went on, “They were their prisoners. They’d get into a room and lock it up. We, as soldiers, didn’t get involved. We’d lock the door for them and leave. We didn’t know what they were doing.” But, he recalled, “we heard a lot of screaming.”
Considering this level of secrecy, it’s doubtful that any details would have emerged about the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death had it not been for a strange and tangential chain of events. Three months after Jamadi died, Jeffrey Hopper, a Navy SEAL who had been assigned to carry out joint operations with the C.I.A. in Baghdad, was accused of stealing another SEAL’s body armor. Hopper, who had been nicknamed Klepto by the unit, was expelled from the Special Forces. When he was dismissed, he told authorities that he knew of far worse offenses committed by other SEALs, and he cited the abuse of several prisoners, including Jamadi. His accusations formed the basis of multiple charges against several SEALs, which led to the court-martial of Lieutenant Andrew Ledford, the commander of the platoon that captured Jamadi, for, among other things, allowing his troops to assault the prisoner. Last May, Ledford was acquitted of any wrongdoing; but during the hearings, which were open, a number of troubling facts spilled out, hinting at the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death.
Seth Hettena, an Associated Press reporter based in San Diego, California, attended the hearings. The courtroom testimony, he reported, indicated that Jamadi, before arriving at Abu Ghraib, was interrogated “in a rough manner” by a combination of SEALs and C.I.A. personnel in “the Romper Room,” a tiny space in the Navy camp at Baghdad International Airport. Swanner was among those present. One of the SEALs testified that after Jamadi was handcuffed a C.I.A. interrogator rammed “his arm up against the detainee’s chest, pressing on him with all his weight.” According to a recent report by John McChesney on National Public Radio, a C.I.A. guard who witnessed the scene later told investigators that, after stripping Jamadi and dousing him in cold water, a C.I.A. interrogator threatened to “barbecue” him if he didn’t talk. Jamadi reportedly moaned, “I’m dying, I’m dying.” The interrogator replied, “You’ll be wishing you were dying.”
Court testimony also established that Jamadi was “body-slammed” by the SEALs into the back of a Humvee before being delivered to Abu Ghraib. During this time, he was handcuffed. “Was he a threat?” a Navy prosecutor asked one of the SEALs on trial. “No, ma’am,” the SEAL conceded.
Soon after the Associated Press published Hettena’s Romper Room story, two unidentified officials, evidently from the C.I.A., appeared in the courtroom. From that point on, Hettena told me, the officials, who did not give their names, protested when the testimony touched on matters sensitive to the C.I.A. In many instances, reporters and other members of the public were required to leave the courtroom. On another occasion, an unidentified C.I.A. witness testified from behind a blue curtain. Several areas of questioning by defense lawyers for the SEALs were ruled off limits. When one of the defense lawyers, Matthew Freedus, asked a witness, “What position was Jamadi in when he died?,” the C.I.A. representatives protested, saying that the answer was classified. The same objection was made when a question was asked about the role that water had played in Jamadi’s interrogation.
By late last spring, the SEALs’ reputations had been tarnished by the exposure of their rough treatment of Jamadi, but they were cleared of the gravest abuse charges. The question of who was responsible for Jamadi’s death remained unanswered. Milt Silverman, one of the defense attorneys, told me, “Who killed Jamadi? I know it wasn’t any of the SEALs. . . . That’s why their cases got dismissed.” Frank Spinner, a civilian lawyer who represented Ledford, said, “There’s a stronger case against the C.I.A. than there is against Ledford. But the military’s being hung out to dry while the C.I.A. skates. I want a public accounting, whether in a trial, a hearing before a congressional committee, or a public report. There’s got to be something more meaningful than sticking the case in a Justice Department drawer.”
Spinner and several of the other defense lawyers learned more about the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death than they were supposed to know, owing to a classification error made by the agency. The C.I.A. sent hundreds of pages of material on Jamadi’s death to the Navy; much of it was classified, and all of it was marked unclassified. The pages were passed on to the civilian lawyers, who read them carefully. The agency, after realizing its mistake, demanded that the lawyers return the classified material, and subsequently sealed virtually all the court records relating to the case. Some of the C.I.A. documents, however, were seen by a source familiar with the case, who shared their contents with me.
Manadel al-Jamadi arrived at Abu Ghraib naked from the waist down, according to an eyewitness, Jason Kenner, an M.P. with the 372nd Military Police Company. In a statement to C.I.A. investigators, Kenner recalled that Jamadi had been stripped of his pants, underpants, socks, and shoes, arriving in only a purple T-shirt and a purple jacket, and with a green plastic sandbag completely covering his head. Nevertheless, Kenner told C.I.A. investigators, “the prisoner did not appear to be in distress. He was walking fine, and his speech was normal.” The plastic “flex cuffs” on Jamadi’s wrists were so tight, however, that Kenner had trouble cutting them off when they were replaced with steel handcuffs and Jamadi’s hands were secured behind his back.
Staff Sergeant Mark Nagy, a reservist in the 372nd Military Police Company, was also on duty at Abu Ghraib when Jamadi arrived. According to the classified internal documents, he told C.I.A. investigators that Jamadi seemed “lucid,” noting that he was “talking during intake.” Nagy said that Jamadi was “not combative” when he was placed in a holding cell, and that he “responded to commands.” In Nagy’s opinion, there was “no need to get physical with him.”
Kenner told the investigators that, “minutes” after Jamadi was placed in the holding cell, an “interrogator”—later identified as Swanner—began “yelling at him, trying to find where some weapons were.” Kenner said that he could see Jamadi through the open door of the holding cell, “in a seated position like a scared child.” The yelling went on, he said, for five or ten minutes. At some point, Kenner said, Swanner and his translator “removed the prisoner’s jacket and shirt,” leaving him naked. He added that he saw no injuries or bruises. Soon afterward, the M.P.s were told by Swanner and the translator to “take the prisoner to Tier One,” the agency’s interrogation wing. The M.P.s dressed Jamadi in a standard-issue orange jumpsuit, keeping the sandbag over his head, and walked him to the shower room there for interrogation. Kenner said that Jamadi put up “no resistance.”
On the way, Nagy noticed that Jamadi was “groaning and breathing heavily, as if he was out of breath.” Walter Diaz, the M.P. who had been on guard duty at the prison, told C.I.A. investigators that Jamadi showed “no distress or complaints on the way to the shower room.” But he told me that he, too, noticed that Jamadi was having “breathing problems.” An autopsy showed that Jamadi had six fractured ribs; it is unclear when they were broken. The C.I.A. officials in charge of Jamadi did not give him even a cursory medical exam, although the Geneva Conventions require that prisoners receive “medical attention.”
“Jamadi was basically a ‘ghost prisoner,’ ” a former investigator on the case, who declined to be named, told me. “He wasn’t checked into the facility. People like this, they just bring ’em in, and use the facility for interrogations. The lower-ranking enlisted guys there just followed the orders from O.G.A. There was no booking process.”
According to Kenner’s testimony, when the group reached the shower room Swanner told the M.P.s that “he did not want the prisoner to sit and he wanted him shackled to the wall.” (No explanation for this decision is recorded.) There was a barred window on one wall. Kenner and Nagy, using a pair of leg shackles, attached Jamadi’s arms, which had been placed behind his back, to the bars on the window.
The Associated Press quoted an expert who described the position in which Jamadi died as a form of torture known as “Palestinian hanging,” in which a prisoner whose hands are secured behind his back is suspended by his arms. (The technique has allegedly been used in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) The M.P.s’ sworn accounts to investigators suggest that, at least at first, Jamadi was able to stand up, without pain: autopsy records show that he was five feet ten, and, as Diaz explained to me, the window was about five feet off the ground. The accounts concur that, while Jamadi was able to stand without discomfort, he couldn’t kneel or sit without hanging painfully from his arms. Once he was secured, the M.P.s left him alone in the room with Swanner and the translator.
Less than an hour later, Diaz said, he was walking past the shower room when Swanner came out and asked for help, reportedly saying, “This guy doesn’t want to coöperate.” According to the NPR report, one of the C.I.A. men told investigators that he called for medical help, but there is no available record of a doctor having been summoned. When Diaz entered the shower room, he said, he was surprised to see that Jamadi’s knees had buckled, and that he was almost kneeling. Swanner, he said, wanted the soldiers to reposition Jamadi, so that he would have to stand more erectly. Diaz called for additional help from two other soldiers in his company, Sergeant Jeffery Frost and Dennis Stevanus. But after they had succeeded in making Jamadi stand for a moment, as requested, by hitching his handcuffs higher up the window, Jamadi collapsed again. Diaz told me, “At first I was, like, ‘This guy’s drunk.’ He just dropped down to where his hands were, like, coming out of his handcuffs. He looked weird. I was thinking, He’s got to be hurting. All of his weight was on his hands and wrists—it looked like he was about to mess up his sockets.”
Swanner, whom Diaz described as a “kind of shabby-looking, overweight white guy,” who was wearing black clothing, was apparently less concerned. “He was saying, ‘He’s just playing dead,’ ” Diaz recalled. “He thought he was faking. He wasn’t worried at all.” While Jamadi hung from his arms, Diaz told me, Swanner “just kept talking and talking at him. But there was no answer.”
Frost told C.I.A. investigators that the interrogator had said that Jamadi was just “playing possum.” But, as Frost lifted Jamadi upright by his jumpsuit, noticing that it was digging into his crotch, he thought, This prisoner is pretty good at playing possum. When Jamadi’s body went slack again, Frost recalled commenting that he “had never seen anyone’s arms positioned like that, and he was surprised they didn’t just pop out of their sockets.”
Diaz, sensing that something was wrong, lifted Jamadi’s hood. His face was badly bruised. Diaz placed a finger in front of Jamadi’s open eyes, which didn’t move or blink, and deduced that he was dead. When the men lowered Jamadi to the floor, Frost told investigators, “blood came gushing out of his nose and mouth, as if a faucet had been turned on.”
Swanner, who had seemed so unperturbed, suddenly appeared “surprised” and “dumbfounded,” according to Frost. He began talking about how Jamadi had fought and resisted the entire way to the prison. He also made calls on his cell phone. Within minutes, Diaz said, four or five additional O.G.A. officers, also dressed in black, arrived on the scene.
Dr. Steven Miles, a medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota, who is writing a study of U.S. medical practices during the war on terrorism, has examined the Jamadi incident extensively. He recently recounted to me what happened that morning: “An Iraqi medical doctor working with the C.I.A. confirmed Jamadi’s death. Captain Donald Reese, the commander of Abu Ghraib M.P.s, came to the shower room and heard Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, the commander of military intelligence at the prison, say, ‘I am not going down for this alone.’ ”
C.I.A. personnel ordered that Jamadi’s body be kept in the shower room until the next morning. The corpse was packed in ice and bound with tape, apparently in an attempt to slow its decomposition and, Miles believes, to try to alter the perceived time of death. The ice was already melting when Specialist Sabrina Harman posed for pictures while stooping over Jamadi’s body, smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign. The next day, a medic inserted an I.V. in Jamadi’s arm, put the body on a stretcher, and took it out of the prison as if Jamadi were merely ill, so as to “not upset the other detainees.” Other interrogators, Miles said, “were told that Jamadi had died of a heart attack.” (There is no medical evidence that Jamadi experienced heart failure.) A military-intelligence officer later recounted that a local taxi-driver was paid to take away Jamadi’s body.
Before leaving, Frost told investigators, Swanner confided that he “did not get any information out of the prisoner.” C.I.A. officials took with them the bloodied hood that had covered Jamadi’s head; it was later thrown away. “They destroyed evidence, and failed to preserve the scene of the crime,” Spinner, the lawyer for one of the Navy SEALs, said.
The next day, Swanner gave a statement to Army investigators, stressing that he hadn’t laid a hand on Jamadi, and hadn’t done anything wrong. “Clint C.,” the translator, also said that Swanner hadn’t beaten Jamadi. “I don’t think anybody intended the guy to die,” a former investigator on the case, who asked not to be identified, told me. But he believes that the decision to shackle Jamadi to the window reflected an intent to cause suffering. (Under American and international law, intent is central to assessing criminality in war-crimes and torture cases.) The C.I.A., he said, “put him in that position to get him to talk. They took it that pain equals coöperation.”
The autopsy, performed by military pathologists five days later, classified Jamadi’s death as a homicide, saying that the cause of death was “compromised respiration” and “blunt force injuries” to Jamadi’s head and torso. But it appears that the pathologists who performed the autopsy were unaware that Jamadi had been shackled to a high window. When a description of Jamadi’s position was shared with two of the country’s most prominent medical examiners—both of whom volunteered to review the autopsy report free, at the request of a lawyer representing one of the SEALs—their conclusion was different. Miles, independently, concurred.
One of those examiners, Dr. Michael Baden, who is the chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, told me, “What struck me was that Jamadi was alive and well when he walked into the prison. The SEALs were accused of causing head injuries before he arrived, but he had no significant head injuries—certainly no brain injuries that would have caused death.” Jamadi’s bruises, he said, were no doubt painful, but they were not life-threatening. Baden went on, “He also had injuries to his ribs. You don’t die from broken ribs. But if he had been hung up in this way and had broken ribs, that’s different.” In his judgment, “asphyxia is what he died from—as in a crucifixion.” Baden, who had inspected a plastic bag of the type that was placed over Jamadi’s head, said that the bag “could have impaired his breath, but he couldn’t have died from that alone.” Of greater concern, he thought, was Jamadi’s position. “If his hands were pulled up five feet—that’s to his neck. That’s pretty tough. That would put a lot of tension on his rib muscles, which are needed for breathing. It’s not only painful—it can hinder the diaphragm from going up and down, and the rib cage from expanding. The muscles tire, and the breathing function is impaired, so there’s less oxygen entering the bloodstream.” A person in such a state would first lose consciousness, he said, and eventually would die. The hood, he suggested, would likely have compounded the problem, because the interrogators “can’t see his face if he’s turning blue. We see a lot about a patient’s condition by looking at his face. By putting that goddam hood on, they can’t see if he’s conscious.” It also “doesn’t permit them to know when he died.” The bottom line, Baden said, is that Jamadi “didn’t die as a result of any injury he got before getting to the prison.”
Dr. Cyril Wecht, a medical doctor and a lawyer who is the coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a former president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, independently reached the same conclusion. The interpretation put forward by the military pathologists, he said, “didn’t fit with their own report. They said he died of blunt-force trauma, yet there was no significant evidence of trauma to the head.” Instead, Wecht believes that Jamadi “died of compromised respiration,” and that “the position the body was in would have been the cause of death.” He added, “Mind you, I’m not a critic of the Iraq war. But I don’t think we should reduce ourselves to the insurgents’ barbaric levels.”
Walter Diaz told me, “Someone should be charged. If Jamadi was already handcuffed, there was no reason to treat the guy the way they did—the way they hung him.” Diaz said he didn’t know if Swanner had intended to torture Jamadi, or whether the death was accidental. But he was troubled by the government’s inaction, and by what he saw as the agency’s attempt at a coverup. “They tried to blame the SEALs. The C.I.A. had a big role in this. But you know the C.I.A.—who’s going to go against them?”
According to Jeffrey Smith, the former general counsel of the C.I.A., now a private-practice lawyer who handles national-security cases, a decision to prosecute Swanner “would probably go all the way up to the Attorney General.” Critics of the Administration, such as John Sifton, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, question whether Alberto Gonzales, who became Attorney General last year, has too many conflicts of interest to weigh the case against Swanner fairly. Sifton said, “It’s hard to imagine the current leadership pursuing these guys, because the head of the Justice Department, Alberto Gonzales, is centrally implicated in crafting the policies that led to the abuse.” He suggested that the prudent thing for Gonzales to do would be to “recuse himself from such a decision, and leave it to a deputy, or a career officer.”
But there are political conflicts here, too. It is in the office of Paul McNulty—whose nomination to become Gonzales’s deputy will soon be presented to Congress, and who was a Republican congressional staff member before being named a U.S. Attorney—that the Jamadi case has stalled. And Alice Fisher, the new head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, got that job only under a recess appointment; during her confirmation hearings, Fisher, who previously handled counter-terrorism cases for the department, refused to provide all the information requested about her knowledge of C.I.A. prisoner abuse, and Congress did not approve her nomination.
Even more troubling is the possibility that, under the Bush Administration’s secret interrogation guidelines, the killing of Jamadi might not have broken any laws. Jeffrey Smith says it’s possible that the Office of Legal Counsel’s memos may have opened too many loopholes for interrogators like Swanner, “making prosecution somehow too hard to do.” Smith added, “But, even under the expanded definition of torture, I don’t see how someone beaten with his hands bound, who then died while hanging—how that could be legal. I’d be embarrassed if anyone argued that it was.”
Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until January. Before his tenure ended, he looked at the full, classified set of photographs from Abu Ghraib. In a recent interview at his office in the Capitol, he said, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to go to a closed room where you have a classified briefing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues in the Senate, and see hundreds and hundreds of slides like those of Abu Ghraib, most of which have never been publicly disclosed. I had a sick feeling when I left.” He went on, “It was then that I began to have suspicions that something significant was happening at the highest levels of the government when it came to torture policy.”
Since then, Durbin has been trying to close the loopholes that allow government personnel to engage in brutal interrogations. Last year, he introduced an amendment to the defense-authorization bill affirming that the C.I.A. was covered by U.S. laws forbidding torture and the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners. But his effort met intense resistance from the Bush Administration, and the amendment did not pass. Durbin tried other legislative stratagems, without much success. Eventually, John McCain took up Durbin’s cause—which led to last month’s confrontation with Cheney and Goss. The Abu Ghraib scandal seems not to have chastened Cheney or any other Administration officials; in fact, they are for the first time arguing openly and explicitly that C.I.A. personnel should be exempt from standards that apply to every other American.
“I’m concerned that the government isn’t going forward on these prosecutions,” Durbin said of the C.I.A. cases. “It’s really hard to follow the Administration’s policies here. I think the world was very simple before 9/11. We knew what the law was, and I understood it to apply to everyone in the government. Now there’s real uncertainty. There’s a shadow over our nation that needs lifting.”
A DEADLY INTERROGATION
by JANE MAYER
Can the C.I.A. legally kill a prisoner?
Issue of 2005-11-14
Posted 2005-11-07
At the end of a secluded cul-de-sac, in a fast-growing Virginia suburb favored by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a handsome replica of an old-fashioned farmhouse, with a white-railed front porch. The large back yard has a swimming pool, which, on a recent October afternoon, was neatly covered. In the driveway were two cars, a late-model truck, and an all-terrain vehicle. The sole discordant note was struck by a faded American flag on the porch; instead of fluttering in the autumn breeze, it was folded on a heap of old Christmas ornaments.
The house belongs to Mark Swanner, a forty-six-year-old C.I.A. officer who has performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency, which has employed him at least since the nineteen-nineties. (He is not a covert operative.) Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in Swanner’s custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,” meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency.
After September 11th, the Justice Department fashioned secret legal guidelines that appear to indemnify C.I.A. officials who perform aggressive, even violent interrogations outside the United States. Techniques such as waterboarding—the near-drowning of a suspect—have been implicitly authorized by an Administration that feels that such methods may be necessary to win the war on terrorism. (In 2001, Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an interview on “Meet the Press,” said that the government might have to go to “the dark side” in handling terrorist suspects, adding, “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.”) The harsh treatment of Jamadi and other prisoners in C.I.A. custody, however, has inspired an emotional debate in Washington, raising questions about what limits should be placed on agency officials who interrogate foreign terrorist suspects outside U.S. territory.
This fall, in response to the exposure of widespread prisoner abuse at American detention facilities abroad—among them Abu Ghraib; Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba; and Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan—John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, introduced a bill in Congress that would require Americans holding prisoners abroad to follow the same standards of humane treatment required at home by the U.S. Constitution. Prisoners must not be brutalized, the bill states, regardless of their “nationality or physical location.” On October 5th, in a rebuke to President Bush, who strongly opposed McCain’s proposal, the Senate voted 90–9 in favor of it.
Senior Administration officials have led a fierce, and increasingly visible, fight to protect the C.I.A.’s classified interrogation protocol. Late last month, Cheney and Porter Goss, the C.I.A. director, had an unusual forty-five-minute private meeting on Capitol Hill with Senator McCain, who was tortured as a P.O.W. during the Vietnam War. They argued that the C.I.A. sometimes needs the “flexibility” to treat detainees in the war on terrorism in “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” ways. Cheney sought to add an exemption to McCain’s bill, permitting brutal methods when “such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack.” A Washington Post editorial decried Cheney’s visit, calling him the “Vice-President for Torture.” In the coming weeks, a conference committee of the House and the Senate will decide whether McCain’s proposal becomes law; three of the nine senators who voted against the measure are on the committee.
The outcome of this wider political debate may play a role in determining the fate of Swanner, whose name has not been publicly disclosed before, and who declined several requests to be interviewed. Passage of the McCain legislation by both Houses of Congress would mean that there is strong political opposition to the abusive treatment of prisoners, and would put increased pressure on the Justice Department to prosecute interrogators like Swanner—who could conceivably be charged with assault, negligent manslaughter, or torture. Swanner’s lawyer, Nina Ginsberg, declined to discuss his case on the record. But he has been under investigation by the Justice Department for more than a year.
Manadel al-Jamadi was captured by Navy SEALs at 2 a.m. on November 4, 2003, after a violent struggle at his house, outside Baghdad. Jamadi savagely fought one of the SEALs before being subdued in his kitchen; during the altercation, his stove fell on them. The C.I.A. had identified him as a “high-value” target, because he had allegedly supplied the explosives used in several atrocities perpetrated by insurgents, including the bombing of the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, in October, 2003. After being removed from his house, Jamadi was manhandled by several of the SEALs, who gave him a black eye and a cut on his face; he was then transferred to C.I.A. custody, for interrogation at Abu Ghraib. According to witnesses, Jamadi was walking and speaking when he arrived at the prison. He was taken to a shower room for interrogation. Some forty-five minutes later, he was dead.
For most of the time that Jamadi was being interrogated at Abu Ghraib, there were only two people in the room with him. One was an Arabic-speaking translator for the C.I.A. working on a private contract, who has been identified in military-court papers only as “Clint C.” He was given immunity against criminal prosecution in exchange for his coöperation. The other person was Mark Swanner.
In the spring of 2004, the fact of pervasive prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib became public, on “60 Minutes II” and in a series of articles in these pages by Seymour M. Hersh. Photographs, taken by U.S. soldiers, that showed Iraqi prisoners being hooded, sexually humiliated, and threatened with dogs were published around the world. One of the most harrowing images was of Jamadi’s severely battered corpse, which had been wrapped in plastic and put on ice; he became known in the media as the Ice Man.
Around this time, John Helgerson, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, sent investigators to Iraq and San Diego to interview witnesses about the agency’s role in Jamadi’s death. These investigators determined that there was the possibility of criminality—the threshold level required by the intelligence agency in order for the case to be referred to the Justice Department. The agency did so, and officials in the Justice Department then forwarded the case to the office of Paul McNulty, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, which has jurisdiction over C.I.A. headquarters. The dossier has been there for more than a year. A lawyer familiar with the case, who asked not to be named, said that the Swanner file seemed to be “lying kind of fallow.”
A spokeswoman for McNulty said that he would have no comment on the case, because it was still under investigation. (Last month, President Bush nominated McNulty to the position of Deputy Attorney General, the second most powerful job in the Justice Department.) No other official in the Justice Department would discuss on the record why, more than two years after Jamadi’s death, no decision has been made about pressing charges against anyone.
A government official familiar with the case, who declined to be named, indicated that establishing guilt in the case might be complicated, because of Jamadi’s rough handling by the SEALs before he entered the custody of the C.I.A. Yet, in the past two years, several of the Navy SEALs who captured Jamadi and delivered him to C.I.A. officials have faced abuse charges in military-justice proceedings, and have been exonerated. Moreover, three medical experts who have examined Jamadi’s case told me that the injuries he sustained from the SEALs could not have caused his death.
Fred Hitz, who served as the C.I.A.’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, and who is now a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University, said of Bush Administration officials, “I just think they’re playing stall ball.” He told me that he had no inside knowledge of the Swanner case, but he believes that, for numerous reasons, ranging from protecting national security to avoiding political embarrassment, Administration officials “would be opposed to any accountability in this case. They want it to disappear off the screen.” (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said that its internal investigation into Jamadi’s death was “nearly complete,” making it “inappropriate to discuss any of the details.”)
John Radsan, a lawyer formerly in the C.I.A’s Office of General Counsel, says, “Along with the usual problems of dealing with classified information in a criminal case, this could open a can of worms if a C.I.A. official in this case got indicted—a big fat can of worms about what set of rules apply to people like Jamadi. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is: What has been authorized? Can the C.I.A. torture people? A case like this opens up Pandora’s box.”
Since September 11, 2001, the C.I.A.’s treatment and interrogation of terrorist suspects has remained almost entirely hidden from public view. Human-rights groups estimate that some ten thousand foreign suspects are being held in U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and other countries. A small but unknown part of this population is in the custody of the C.I.A., which, as Dana Priest reported recently in the Washington Post, has operated secret prisons in Thailand and in Eastern Europe. It is also unclear how seriously the agency deals with allegations of prisoner abuse. The C.I.A. tends to be careful about following strict legal procedures, including the briefing of the top-ranking members of the congressional intelligence committees on its covert activities. But experts could recall no instance of a C.I.A. officer being tried in a public courtroom for manslaughter or murder. Thomas Powers, the author of two books about the C.I.A., told me, “I’ve never heard of anyone at the C.I.A. being convicted of a killing.” He added that a case such as Jamadi’s had awkward political implications. “Is the C.I.A. capable of addressing an illegal killing by its own hands?” he asked. “My guess is not.” Whereas the military has subjected itself to a dozen internal investigations in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, and has punished more than two hundred soldiers for wrongdoing, the agency has undertaken almost no public self-examination.
The C.I.A. has reportedly been implicated in at least four deaths of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, including that of Jamadi, and has referred eight potentially criminal cases involving abuse and misconduct to the Justice Department. In March, Goss, the C.I.A.’s director, testified before Congress that “we don’t do torture,” and the agency’s press office issued a release stating, “All approved interrogation techniques, both past and present, are lawful and do not constitute torture. . . . C.I.A. policies on interrogation have always followed legal guidance from the Department of Justice. If an individual violates the policy, then he or she will be held accountable.”
Yet the government has brought charges against only one person affiliated with the agency: David Passaro, a low-level contract employee, not a full-fledged C.I.A. officer. In 2003, Passaro, while interrogating an Afghan prisoner, allegedly beat him with a flashlight so severely that he eventually died from his injuries. In two other incidents of prisoner abuse, the Times reported last month, charges probably will not be brought against C.I.A. personnel: the 2003 case of an Iraqi prisoner who was forced head first into a sleeping bag, then beaten; and the 2002 abuse of an Afghan prisoner who froze to death after being stripped and chained to the floor of a concrete cell. (The C.I.A. supervisor involved in the latter case was subsequently promoted.)
One reason these C.I.A. officials may not be facing charges is that, in recent years, the Justice Department has established a strikingly narrow definition of torture. In August, 2002, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel sent a memo on interrogations to the White House, which argued that a coercive technique was torture only when it induced pain equivalent to what a person experiencing death or organ failure might suffer. By implication, all lesser forms of physical and psychological mistreatment—what critics have called “torture lite”—were legal. The memo also said that torture was illegal only when it could be proved that the interrogator intended to cause the required level of pain. And it provided interrogators with another large exemption: torture might be acceptable if an interrogator was acting in accordance with military “necessity.” A source familiar with the memo’s origins, who declined to speak on the record, said that it “was written as an immunity, a blank check.” In 2004, the “torture memo,” as it became known, was leaked, complicating the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be Attorney General; as White House counsel, Gonzales had approved the memo. The Administration subsequently revised the guidelines, using language that seemed more restrictive. But a little-noticed footnote protected the coercive methods permitted by the “torture memo,” stating that they did not violate the “standards set forth in this memorandum.”
The Bush Administration has resisted disclosing the contents of two Justice Department memos that established a detailed interrogation policy for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. A March, 2003, classified memo was “breathtaking,” the same source said. The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated. Another classified Justice Department memo, issued in August, 2002, is said to authorize numerous “enhanced” interrogation techniques for the C.I.A. These two memos sanction such extreme measures that, even if the agency wanted to discipline or prosecute agents who stray beyond its own comfort level, the legal tools to do so may no longer exist. Like the torture memo, these documents are believed to have been signed by Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, but written by a Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, who is now a professor of law at Berkeley.
For nearly a year, Democratic senators critical of alleged abuses have been demanding to see these memos. “We need to know what was authorized,” Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, told me. “Was it waterboarding? The use of dogs? Stripping detainees? . . . The refusal to give us these documents is totally inexcusable.” Levin is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to have an oversight role in relation to the C.I.A. “The Administration is getting away with just saying no,” he went on. “There’s no claim of executive privilege. There’s no claim of national security—we’ve offered to keep it classified. It’s just "expletive deleted". They just don’t want us to know what they’re doing, or have done.”
By the summer of 2003, the insurgency against the U.S. occupation of Iraq had grown into a confounding and lethal insurrection, and the Pentagon and the White House were pressing C.I.A. agents and members of the Special Forces to get the kind of intelligence needed to crush it. On orders from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, General Geoffrey Miller, who had overseen coercive interrogations of terrorist suspects at Guantánamo, imposed similar methods at Abu Ghraib. In October of that year, however—a month before Jamadi’s death—the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating that Iraqi insurgents were covered by the Geneva Conventions, which require the humane treatment of prisoners and forbid coercive interrogations. The ruling reversed an earlier interpretation, which had concluded, erroneously, that Iraqi insurgents were not protected by international law.
As a result of these contradictory mandates from Washington, the rules of engagement at Abu Ghraib became muddy, and the tactics grew increasingly ad hoc. Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the C.I.A., told me, “Abu Ghraib has its roots at the top. I think this uncertainty about who was and who was not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and all this talk that they’re all terrorists, bred the climate in which this kind of abuse takes place.”
At Abu Ghraib, the confusion over interrogation and detention methods was compounded by the fact that C.I.A. officials worked side by side with U.S. military people. Colonel Janis Karpinski, a former commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which oversaw the administration of Abu Ghraib during the period of widespread abuse, has said that C.I.A. officers, along with contract interpreters and some military-intelligence officers, did not wear uniforms when they visited the prison, and it was not clear, even to her, what they were doing there. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians I didn’t know,” she told Seymour Hersh. “I called them disappearing ghosts. . . . They were always bringing in somebody for interrogation, or waiting to collect somebody going out.” C.I.A. officials, unlike members of the Army and the Navy, are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibits “cruelty toward, or oppression or maltreatment of” prisoners.
Walter Diaz, a military policeman, was on guard duty at Abu Ghraib the morning that Jamadi was delivered to the prison. He told me, “The O.G.A.”— “other government agencies,” initials commonly used to protect the identity of the C.I.A.—“would bring in people all the time to interview them. We had one wing, Tier One Alpha, reserved for the O.G.A. They’d have maybe twenty people there at a time.” He went on, “They were their prisoners. They’d get into a room and lock it up. We, as soldiers, didn’t get involved. We’d lock the door for them and leave. We didn’t know what they were doing.” But, he recalled, “we heard a lot of screaming.”
Considering this level of secrecy, it’s doubtful that any details would have emerged about the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death had it not been for a strange and tangential chain of events. Three months after Jamadi died, Jeffrey Hopper, a Navy SEAL who had been assigned to carry out joint operations with the C.I.A. in Baghdad, was accused of stealing another SEAL’s body armor. Hopper, who had been nicknamed Klepto by the unit, was expelled from the Special Forces. When he was dismissed, he told authorities that he knew of far worse offenses committed by other SEALs, and he cited the abuse of several prisoners, including Jamadi. His accusations formed the basis of multiple charges against several SEALs, which led to the court-martial of Lieutenant Andrew Ledford, the commander of the platoon that captured Jamadi, for, among other things, allowing his troops to assault the prisoner. Last May, Ledford was acquitted of any wrongdoing; but during the hearings, which were open, a number of troubling facts spilled out, hinting at the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death.
Seth Hettena, an Associated Press reporter based in San Diego, California, attended the hearings. The courtroom testimony, he reported, indicated that Jamadi, before arriving at Abu Ghraib, was interrogated “in a rough manner” by a combination of SEALs and C.I.A. personnel in “the Romper Room,” a tiny space in the Navy camp at Baghdad International Airport. Swanner was among those present. One of the SEALs testified that after Jamadi was handcuffed a C.I.A. interrogator rammed “his arm up against the detainee’s chest, pressing on him with all his weight.” According to a recent report by John McChesney on National Public Radio, a C.I.A. guard who witnessed the scene later told investigators that, after stripping Jamadi and dousing him in cold water, a C.I.A. interrogator threatened to “barbecue” him if he didn’t talk. Jamadi reportedly moaned, “I’m dying, I’m dying.” The interrogator replied, “You’ll be wishing you were dying.”
Court testimony also established that Jamadi was “body-slammed” by the SEALs into the back of a Humvee before being delivered to Abu Ghraib. During this time, he was handcuffed. “Was he a threat?” a Navy prosecutor asked one of the SEALs on trial. “No, ma’am,” the SEAL conceded.
Soon after the Associated Press published Hettena’s Romper Room story, two unidentified officials, evidently from the C.I.A., appeared in the courtroom. From that point on, Hettena told me, the officials, who did not give their names, protested when the testimony touched on matters sensitive to the C.I.A. In many instances, reporters and other members of the public were required to leave the courtroom. On another occasion, an unidentified C.I.A. witness testified from behind a blue curtain. Several areas of questioning by defense lawyers for the SEALs were ruled off limits. When one of the defense lawyers, Matthew Freedus, asked a witness, “What position was Jamadi in when he died?,” the C.I.A. representatives protested, saying that the answer was classified. The same objection was made when a question was asked about the role that water had played in Jamadi’s interrogation.
By late last spring, the SEALs’ reputations had been tarnished by the exposure of their rough treatment of Jamadi, but they were cleared of the gravest abuse charges. The question of who was responsible for Jamadi’s death remained unanswered. Milt Silverman, one of the defense attorneys, told me, “Who killed Jamadi? I know it wasn’t any of the SEALs. . . . That’s why their cases got dismissed.” Frank Spinner, a civilian lawyer who represented Ledford, said, “There’s a stronger case against the C.I.A. than there is against Ledford. But the military’s being hung out to dry while the C.I.A. skates. I want a public accounting, whether in a trial, a hearing before a congressional committee, or a public report. There’s got to be something more meaningful than sticking the case in a Justice Department drawer.”
Spinner and several of the other defense lawyers learned more about the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death than they were supposed to know, owing to a classification error made by the agency. The C.I.A. sent hundreds of pages of material on Jamadi’s death to the Navy; much of it was classified, and all of it was marked unclassified. The pages were passed on to the civilian lawyers, who read them carefully. The agency, after realizing its mistake, demanded that the lawyers return the classified material, and subsequently sealed virtually all the court records relating to the case. Some of the C.I.A. documents, however, were seen by a source familiar with the case, who shared their contents with me.
Manadel al-Jamadi arrived at Abu Ghraib naked from the waist down, according to an eyewitness, Jason Kenner, an M.P. with the 372nd Military Police Company. In a statement to C.I.A. investigators, Kenner recalled that Jamadi had been stripped of his pants, underpants, socks, and shoes, arriving in only a purple T-shirt and a purple jacket, and with a green plastic sandbag completely covering his head. Nevertheless, Kenner told C.I.A. investigators, “the prisoner did not appear to be in distress. He was walking fine, and his speech was normal.” The plastic “flex cuffs” on Jamadi’s wrists were so tight, however, that Kenner had trouble cutting them off when they were replaced with steel handcuffs and Jamadi’s hands were secured behind his back.
Staff Sergeant Mark Nagy, a reservist in the 372nd Military Police Company, was also on duty at Abu Ghraib when Jamadi arrived. According to the classified internal documents, he told C.I.A. investigators that Jamadi seemed “lucid,” noting that he was “talking during intake.” Nagy said that Jamadi was “not combative” when he was placed in a holding cell, and that he “responded to commands.” In Nagy’s opinion, there was “no need to get physical with him.”
Kenner told the investigators that, “minutes” after Jamadi was placed in the holding cell, an “interrogator”—later identified as Swanner—began “yelling at him, trying to find where some weapons were.” Kenner said that he could see Jamadi through the open door of the holding cell, “in a seated position like a scared child.” The yelling went on, he said, for five or ten minutes. At some point, Kenner said, Swanner and his translator “removed the prisoner’s jacket and shirt,” leaving him naked. He added that he saw no injuries or bruises. Soon afterward, the M.P.s were told by Swanner and the translator to “take the prisoner to Tier One,” the agency’s interrogation wing. The M.P.s dressed Jamadi in a standard-issue orange jumpsuit, keeping the sandbag over his head, and walked him to the shower room there for interrogation. Kenner said that Jamadi put up “no resistance.”
On the way, Nagy noticed that Jamadi was “groaning and breathing heavily, as if he was out of breath.” Walter Diaz, the M.P. who had been on guard duty at the prison, told C.I.A. investigators that Jamadi showed “no distress or complaints on the way to the shower room.” But he told me that he, too, noticed that Jamadi was having “breathing problems.” An autopsy showed that Jamadi had six fractured ribs; it is unclear when they were broken. The C.I.A. officials in charge of Jamadi did not give him even a cursory medical exam, although the Geneva Conventions require that prisoners receive “medical attention.”
“Jamadi was basically a ‘ghost prisoner,’ ” a former investigator on the case, who declined to be named, told me. “He wasn’t checked into the facility. People like this, they just bring ’em in, and use the facility for interrogations. The lower-ranking enlisted guys there just followed the orders from O.G.A. There was no booking process.”
According to Kenner’s testimony, when the group reached the shower room Swanner told the M.P.s that “he did not want the prisoner to sit and he wanted him shackled to the wall.” (No explanation for this decision is recorded.) There was a barred window on one wall. Kenner and Nagy, using a pair of leg shackles, attached Jamadi’s arms, which had been placed behind his back, to the bars on the window.
The Associated Press quoted an expert who described the position in which Jamadi died as a form of torture known as “Palestinian hanging,” in which a prisoner whose hands are secured behind his back is suspended by his arms. (The technique has allegedly been used in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) The M.P.s’ sworn accounts to investigators suggest that, at least at first, Jamadi was able to stand up, without pain: autopsy records show that he was five feet ten, and, as Diaz explained to me, the window was about five feet off the ground. The accounts concur that, while Jamadi was able to stand without discomfort, he couldn’t kneel or sit without hanging painfully from his arms. Once he was secured, the M.P.s left him alone in the room with Swanner and the translator.
Less than an hour later, Diaz said, he was walking past the shower room when Swanner came out and asked for help, reportedly saying, “This guy doesn’t want to coöperate.” According to the NPR report, one of the C.I.A. men told investigators that he called for medical help, but there is no available record of a doctor having been summoned. When Diaz entered the shower room, he said, he was surprised to see that Jamadi’s knees had buckled, and that he was almost kneeling. Swanner, he said, wanted the soldiers to reposition Jamadi, so that he would have to stand more erectly. Diaz called for additional help from two other soldiers in his company, Sergeant Jeffery Frost and Dennis Stevanus. But after they had succeeded in making Jamadi stand for a moment, as requested, by hitching his handcuffs higher up the window, Jamadi collapsed again. Diaz told me, “At first I was, like, ‘This guy’s drunk.’ He just dropped down to where his hands were, like, coming out of his handcuffs. He looked weird. I was thinking, He’s got to be hurting. All of his weight was on his hands and wrists—it looked like he was about to mess up his sockets.”
Swanner, whom Diaz described as a “kind of shabby-looking, overweight white guy,” who was wearing black clothing, was apparently less concerned. “He was saying, ‘He’s just playing dead,’ ” Diaz recalled. “He thought he was faking. He wasn’t worried at all.” While Jamadi hung from his arms, Diaz told me, Swanner “just kept talking and talking at him. But there was no answer.”
Frost told C.I.A. investigators that the interrogator had said that Jamadi was just “playing possum.” But, as Frost lifted Jamadi upright by his jumpsuit, noticing that it was digging into his crotch, he thought, This prisoner is pretty good at playing possum. When Jamadi’s body went slack again, Frost recalled commenting that he “had never seen anyone’s arms positioned like that, and he was surprised they didn’t just pop out of their sockets.”
Diaz, sensing that something was wrong, lifted Jamadi’s hood. His face was badly bruised. Diaz placed a finger in front of Jamadi’s open eyes, which didn’t move or blink, and deduced that he was dead. When the men lowered Jamadi to the floor, Frost told investigators, “blood came gushing out of his nose and mouth, as if a faucet had been turned on.”
Swanner, who had seemed so unperturbed, suddenly appeared “surprised” and “dumbfounded,” according to Frost. He began talking about how Jamadi had fought and resisted the entire way to the prison. He also made calls on his cell phone. Within minutes, Diaz said, four or five additional O.G.A. officers, also dressed in black, arrived on the scene.
Dr. Steven Miles, a medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota, who is writing a study of U.S. medical practices during the war on terrorism, has examined the Jamadi incident extensively. He recently recounted to me what happened that morning: “An Iraqi medical doctor working with the C.I.A. confirmed Jamadi’s death. Captain Donald Reese, the commander of Abu Ghraib M.P.s, came to the shower room and heard Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, the commander of military intelligence at the prison, say, ‘I am not going down for this alone.’ ”
C.I.A. personnel ordered that Jamadi’s body be kept in the shower room until the next morning. The corpse was packed in ice and bound with tape, apparently in an attempt to slow its decomposition and, Miles believes, to try to alter the perceived time of death. The ice was already melting when Specialist Sabrina Harman posed for pictures while stooping over Jamadi’s body, smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign. The next day, a medic inserted an I.V. in Jamadi’s arm, put the body on a stretcher, and took it out of the prison as if Jamadi were merely ill, so as to “not upset the other detainees.” Other interrogators, Miles said, “were told that Jamadi had died of a heart attack.” (There is no medical evidence that Jamadi experienced heart failure.) A military-intelligence officer later recounted that a local taxi-driver was paid to take away Jamadi’s body.
Before leaving, Frost told investigators, Swanner confided that he “did not get any information out of the prisoner.” C.I.A. officials took with them the bloodied hood that had covered Jamadi’s head; it was later thrown away. “They destroyed evidence, and failed to preserve the scene of the crime,” Spinner, the lawyer for one of the Navy SEALs, said.
The next day, Swanner gave a statement to Army investigators, stressing that he hadn’t laid a hand on Jamadi, and hadn’t done anything wrong. “Clint C.,” the translator, also said that Swanner hadn’t beaten Jamadi. “I don’t think anybody intended the guy to die,” a former investigator on the case, who asked not to be identified, told me. But he believes that the decision to shackle Jamadi to the window reflected an intent to cause suffering. (Under American and international law, intent is central to assessing criminality in war-crimes and torture cases.) The C.I.A., he said, “put him in that position to get him to talk. They took it that pain equals coöperation.”
The autopsy, performed by military pathologists five days later, classified Jamadi’s death as a homicide, saying that the cause of death was “compromised respiration” and “blunt force injuries” to Jamadi’s head and torso. But it appears that the pathologists who performed the autopsy were unaware that Jamadi had been shackled to a high window. When a description of Jamadi’s position was shared with two of the country’s most prominent medical examiners—both of whom volunteered to review the autopsy report free, at the request of a lawyer representing one of the SEALs—their conclusion was different. Miles, independently, concurred.
One of those examiners, Dr. Michael Baden, who is the chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, told me, “What struck me was that Jamadi was alive and well when he walked into the prison. The SEALs were accused of causing head injuries before he arrived, but he had no significant head injuries—certainly no brain injuries that would have caused death.” Jamadi’s bruises, he said, were no doubt painful, but they were not life-threatening. Baden went on, “He also had injuries to his ribs. You don’t die from broken ribs. But if he had been hung up in this way and had broken ribs, that’s different.” In his judgment, “asphyxia is what he died from—as in a crucifixion.” Baden, who had inspected a plastic bag of the type that was placed over Jamadi’s head, said that the bag “could have impaired his breath, but he couldn’t have died from that alone.” Of greater concern, he thought, was Jamadi’s position. “If his hands were pulled up five feet—that’s to his neck. That’s pretty tough. That would put a lot of tension on his rib muscles, which are needed for breathing. It’s not only painful—it can hinder the diaphragm from going up and down, and the rib cage from expanding. The muscles tire, and the breathing function is impaired, so there’s less oxygen entering the bloodstream.” A person in such a state would first lose consciousness, he said, and eventually would die. The hood, he suggested, would likely have compounded the problem, because the interrogators “can’t see his face if he’s turning blue. We see a lot about a patient’s condition by looking at his face. By putting that goddam hood on, they can’t see if he’s conscious.” It also “doesn’t permit them to know when he died.” The bottom line, Baden said, is that Jamadi “didn’t die as a result of any injury he got before getting to the prison.”
Dr. Cyril Wecht, a medical doctor and a lawyer who is the coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a former president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, independently reached the same conclusion. The interpretation put forward by the military pathologists, he said, “didn’t fit with their own report. They said he died of blunt-force trauma, yet there was no significant evidence of trauma to the head.” Instead, Wecht believes that Jamadi “died of compromised respiration,” and that “the position the body was in would have been the cause of death.” He added, “Mind you, I’m not a critic of the Iraq war. But I don’t think we should reduce ourselves to the insurgents’ barbaric levels.”
Walter Diaz told me, “Someone should be charged. If Jamadi was already handcuffed, there was no reason to treat the guy the way they did—the way they hung him.” Diaz said he didn’t know if Swanner had intended to torture Jamadi, or whether the death was accidental. But he was troubled by the government’s inaction, and by what he saw as the agency’s attempt at a coverup. “They tried to blame the SEALs. The C.I.A. had a big role in this. But you know the C.I.A.—who’s going to go against them?”
According to Jeffrey Smith, the former general counsel of the C.I.A., now a private-practice lawyer who handles national-security cases, a decision to prosecute Swanner “would probably go all the way up to the Attorney General.” Critics of the Administration, such as John Sifton, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, question whether Alberto Gonzales, who became Attorney General last year, has too many conflicts of interest to weigh the case against Swanner fairly. Sifton said, “It’s hard to imagine the current leadership pursuing these guys, because the head of the Justice Department, Alberto Gonzales, is centrally implicated in crafting the policies that led to the abuse.” He suggested that the prudent thing for Gonzales to do would be to “recuse himself from such a decision, and leave it to a deputy, or a career officer.”
But there are political conflicts here, too. It is in the office of Paul McNulty—whose nomination to become Gonzales’s deputy will soon be presented to Congress, and who was a Republican congressional staff member before being named a U.S. Attorney—that the Jamadi case has stalled. And Alice Fisher, the new head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, got that job only under a recess appointment; during her confirmation hearings, Fisher, who previously handled counter-terrorism cases for the department, refused to provide all the information requested about her knowledge of C.I.A. prisoner abuse, and Congress did not approve her nomination.
Even more troubling is the possibility that, under the Bush Administration’s secret interrogation guidelines, the killing of Jamadi might not have broken any laws. Jeffrey Smith says it’s possible that the Office of Legal Counsel’s memos may have opened too many loopholes for interrogators like Swanner, “making prosecution somehow too hard to do.” Smith added, “But, even under the expanded definition of torture, I don’t see how someone beaten with his hands bound, who then died while hanging—how that could be legal. I’d be embarrassed if anyone argued that it was.”
Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until January. Before his tenure ended, he looked at the full, classified set of photographs from Abu Ghraib. In a recent interview at his office in the Capitol, he said, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to go to a closed room where you have a classified briefing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues in the Senate, and see hundreds and hundreds of slides like those of Abu Ghraib, most of which have never been publicly disclosed. I had a sick feeling when I left.” He went on, “It was then that I began to have suspicions that something significant was happening at the highest levels of the government when it came to torture policy.”
Since then, Durbin has been trying to close the loopholes that allow government personnel to engage in brutal interrogations. Last year, he introduced an amendment to the defense-authorization bill affirming that the C.I.A. was covered by U.S. laws forbidding torture and the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners. But his effort met intense resistance from the Bush Administration, and the amendment did not pass. Durbin tried other legislative stratagems, without much success. Eventually, John McCain took up Durbin’s cause—which led to last month’s confrontation with Cheney and Goss. The Abu Ghraib scandal seems not to have chastened Cheney or any other Administration officials; in fact, they are for the first time arguing openly and explicitly that C.I.A. personnel should be exempt from standards that apply to every other American.
“I’m concerned that the government isn’t going forward on these prosecutions,” Durbin said of the C.I.A. cases. “It’s really hard to follow the Administration’s policies here. I think the world was very simple before 9/11. We knew what the law was, and I understood it to apply to everyone in the government. Now there’s real uncertainty. There’s a shadow over our nation that needs lifting.”
Thank you for posting this petition. Please explore the entire site.
http://bordc.org/index.php
Welcome to the Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Many people are concerned that sections of the USA PATRIOT Act and other new laws and policies meant to prevent terrorism undermine basic civil rights and liberties.
The Bill of Rights Defense Committee helps people convert their concerns into meaningful action to restore protections guaranteed under the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution.
Latest Resolutions:
·Silver City, NV 11/1
·Columbia, SC 10/26
·South Brunswick, NJ 10/11
State Resolutions:
·Alaska
·Colorado
·Hawaii
·Idaho
·Maine
·Montana
·Vermont
Full List:
·Alphabetical by state
·Chronological
·Efforts underway
http://bordc.org/index.php
Welcome to the Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Many people are concerned that sections of the USA PATRIOT Act and other new laws and policies meant to prevent terrorism undermine basic civil rights and liberties.
The Bill of Rights Defense Committee helps people convert their concerns into meaningful action to restore protections guaranteed under the Bill of Rights and the U.S. Constitution.
Latest Resolutions:
·Silver City, NV 11/1
·Columbia, SC 10/26
·South Brunswick, NJ 10/11
State Resolutions:
·Alaska
·Colorado
·Hawaii
·Idaho
·Maine
·Montana
·Vermont
Full List:
·Alphabetical by state
·Chronological
·Efforts underway
Thanks. I signed.
QUOTE
This is a case of more than just bad public relations. Ask any soldier in Iraq when the general population really turned against the United States and he will say, "Abu Ghraib." A few months before the scandal broke, Coalition Provisional Authority polls showed Iraqi support for the occupation at 63 percent. A month after Abu Ghraib, the number was 9 percent. Polls showed that 71 percent of Iraqis were surprised by the revelations. Most telling, 61 percent of Iraqis polled believed that no one would be punished for the torture at Abu Ghraib. Of the 29 percent who said they believed someone would be punished, 52 percent said that such punishment would extend only to "the little people."
And still George Bush & Dick Cheney want to be able to torture.
QUOTE
Cheney told his audience the United States doesn't engage in torture, these participants added, even though he said the administration needed an exemption from any legislation banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in case the president decided one was necessary to prevent a terrorist attack.
http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/...ey-torture.html
Prevent terrorist attack? Yeah, right. Maybe you want to have that option so that you can torture someone else into giving bogus information. Let's see maybe they will tell you that Iran is an immient threat. Yeah, you could use information like that so you could use it to help launch another war?
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/conte...5110800679.html
Bush's Tortured Logic
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, November 8, 2005; 11:59 AM
Just what did President Bush mean yesterday when he said: "We don't torture?"
News outlets all over the world reported Bush's words as if they were definitive. But they are in fact enigmatic at best, because it's not at all clear what the president's definition of torture is.
White House Briefing
Bush's Tortured Logic
His comments came yesterday in a press availability with President Martin Torrijos in Panama, in response to a question about secret CIA prison camps and Vice President Cheney's crusade against legislation that would prohibit U.S. government employees from using cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
But if we don't torture, then why is the White House fighting tooth and nail against a law that would say as much? Why are those prison camps secret? And what are we to make of the widespread, documented practice of prisoner abuse? Bush wouldn't say. And he didn't take any follow-up questions.
Here's the full text of the exchange:
"Q Mr. President, there has been a bit of an international outcry over reports of secret U.S. prisons in Europe for terrorism suspects. Will you let the Red Cross have access to them? And do you agree with Vice President Cheney that the CIA should be exempt from legislation to ban torture?
"PRESIDENT BUSH: Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people. The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people; the legislative branch has the obligation to protect the American people. And we are aggressively doing that. We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture.
"And, therefore, we're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible -- more possible to do our job. There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans, and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet, we'll aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law. And that's why you're seeing members of my administration go and brief the Congress. We want to work together in this matter. We -- all of us have an obligation, and it's a solemn obligation and a solemn responsibility. And I'm confident that when people see the facts, that they'll recognize that we've -- they've got more work to do, and that we must protect ourselves in a way that is lawful."
Leave it to the bloggers to slice and dice:
Andrew Sullivan writes: "If that's the case, why threaten to veto a law that would simply codify what Bush alleges is already the current policy? If 'we do not torture,' how to account for the hundreds and hundreds of cases of abuse and torture by U.S. troops, documented by the government itself? If 'we do not torture,' why the memos that expanded exponentially the lee-way given to the military to abuse detainees in order to get intelligence? The president's only defense against being a liar is that he is defining 'torture' in such a way that no other reasonable person on the planet, apart from Bush's own torture apologists (and they are now down to one who will say so publicly), would agree. The press must now ask the president: does he regard the repeated, forcible near-drowning of detainees to be torture? Does he believe that tying naked detainees up and leaving them outside all night to die of hypothermia is 'torture'? Does he believe that beating the legs of a detainee until they are pulp and he dies is torture? Does he believe that beating detainees till they die is torture? Does he believe that using someone's religious faith against them in interrogations is 'cruel, inhumane and degrading' treatment and thereby illegal? What is his definition of torture?"
Bob Cesca writes on Huffingtonpost.com: "He's either outright lying or the administration has a very different definition of torture than the rest of the world. I would argue that it's both."
Steven C. Clemons writes: "Bush seems to think that his personal assessment about what is within the interests of the United States should be good enough for the citizens of the United States. The problem is that the American public doubts the Bush team's truthfulness -- particularly after the lies and mistruths that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove offered to colleagues like Scott McClellan, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, and the American public in the Valerie Plame outing case."
Clemons also excerpts from the influential Nelson Report, in which Chris Nelson writes that Bush appears to be claiming that when the facts come out, "we will discover that whatever torture which took place was done strictly according to his Administration's legal guidelines.
"And that, of course, goes to the crux of the matter . . . the President's infamous 'torture memo' which authorized CIA and military interrogators to torture someone up to but not past the point of 'organ failure and death' in order to make them talk. A friend with an interesting intelligence analysis approach to all this suggests: 'Bush sincerely, albeit conveniently, believes physical abuse without intent to cause permanent injury or loss to vital organs is not torture, and believes the CIA black op is staying within boundaries most of the time.' (The best historical analogy: 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.') Maybe . . . but even if true, it's hardly exculpation."
The Coverage
Michael A. Fletcher writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush, defending a clandestine U.S. prison system abroad for terrorism suspects, said Monday that his administration would continue to aggressively battle terrorism in sometimes unconventional but always lawful ways."
Richard Benedetto writes in USA Today: "U.S. interrogation practices have been under fire since news accounts in 2004 reported harsh tactics by U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and at detention facilities in Afghanistan. In a new case announced Monday, five Army Rangers were charged with abusing detainees in Iraq. . . .
"Over White House opposition, the Senate voted 90-9 last month to approve an amendment by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would ban the use of torture. Vice President Cheney has pushed for an exemption for the CIA.
"The administration has said in a statement that while it does not condone torture, it opposes the measure because it would be 'unnecessary or duplicative' and could restrict 'the president's ability to conduct the war (on terrorism) effectively under existing law.' "
Kenneth R. Bazinet writes in the New York Daily News: "Despite repeated allegations of prisoner abuse, President Bush claimed yesterday the U.S. doesn't use torture, but he still argued against a proposed congressional ban on the practice. . . .
"But on the same day that Bush disavowed the use of torture, new allegations of prisoner abuse by U.S. troops erupted in Baghdad."
Warren P. Strobel and James Kuhnhenn write for Knight Ridder Newspapers: "Nineteen months after the first revelations of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, the Bush administration's position on treating detainees is increasingly under fire.
"[A] growing number of lawmakers, both moderate Republicans and Democrats, argue that abuse of prisoners is immoral, has devastated the United States' image and ability to project its values overseas, and would endanger captured American soldiers or civilians."
Separation of Powers on Trial
Charles Lane writes in The Washington Post: "The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to rule on the legality of the Bush administration's planned military commissions for accused terrorists, setting up what could be one of the most significant rulings on presidential war powers since the end of World War II.
"President Bush has claimed broad power to conduct the war against al Qaeda and said that questions about the detention of suspected terrorists, their interrogation, trial and punishment are matters for him to decide as commander in chief.
"But the court's announcement that it would hear the case of Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, shows that the justices feel the judicial branch has a role to play as well. The court has focused on whether Bush has the power to set up the commissions and whether detainees facing military trials can go to court in the United States to secure the protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions."
Linda Greenhouse writes in the New York Times: "Mr. Hamdan's lawyers, Professor Neal K. Katyal of Georgetown University Law Center and Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, argue that the president's executive action establishing the military commissions was simply without authorization.
" 'The president's unilateral creation of commissions,' they argue, 'his single-handed definition of the offenses and persons subject to their jurisdiction, and his promulgation of the rules of procedure combine to violate separation of powers.' They add: 'The Revolution was fought to ensure that no man, or branch of government, could be so powerful.' "
Beyond the Paper Trail
Walter Pincus writes in The Washington Post: "Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee want the right to interview top policymakers or speechwriters as part of the inquiry into whether the Bush administration exaggerated or misused intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the panel's vice chairman, said yesterday.
"Rockefeller raised the possibility of issuing subpoenas, and outlined a more wide-ranging approach than the one described by Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who said the work would center on comparing public statements by administration officials to intelligence reports circulating at the time. Rockefeller, Roberts and four other senators are to meet today to work out a schedule and process for the committee's review."
Robert Scheer writes in his Los Angeles Times column: "Who in the White House knew about DITSUM No. 044-02 and when did they know it?
"That's the newly declassified smoking-gun document, originally prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 but ignored by President Bush. Its declassification this weekend blows another huge hole in Bush's claim that he was acting on the best intelligence available when he pitched the invasion of Iraq as a way to prevent an Al Qaeda terror attack using weapons of mass destruction."
On MSNBC, Chris Matthews last night kicked off a full week of shows devoted to the CIA leak case with a look back at how the case for war was sold in the first place.
Matthews: "Three years ago, the White House persuaded the media, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and a majority of the American people to accept their case for military action in Iraq -- largely based on a very powerful image, a nuclear mushroom cloud. The president, the vice president and others repeatedly warned of the looming threat of a nuclear weapon in Saddam Hussein`s arsenal that could be used against the territory of the United States."
Here's David Shuster's report on how that happened.
No-Pardon Pledge?
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid yesterday called on President Bush to affirmatively state that he will not pardon any of the people involved in the leaking of classified information.
Arianna Huffington writes in her blog: "According to the pundits, a pardon is a done deal. All that's up for grabs is the timing.
"Will it be after Scooter changes his plea to guilty, thus pulling the plug on a trial -- and robbing us of the pleasure of seeing Dick Cheney on the stand, under oath, being grilled on WMD, aluminum tubes, the WHIG, and the campaign to smear Joe Wilson? Or will Bush follow in the footsteps of his father's pardon of Cap Weinberger, and give Libby his presidential Stay Out of Jail Free card preemptively, before he even has to admit to any wrongdoing?
"Of course, there is a third option: Bush assenting to Reid's request and taking the pardon option off the table. That would be the best way to offer the American people the chance to finally learn the truth -- which after all, is what the president has repeatedly said he is after. . . .
"I hear that a number of powerful Democratic senators are working behind the scenes on a plan to force the issue."
The End of a Bad Trip
Edwin Chen writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Before Bush left for his visit to Argentina -- where he attended the Summit of the Americas -- Brazil and Panama, some analysts thought the trip abroad might help him shake off political troubles in Washington and put him in a statesmanlike setting. But afterward, several said the trip was far from a ringing success.
" 'The trip hasn't helped at all in Latin America. It reduced his stature in Latin America,' said David de Ferranti, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. 'To the extent that the Bush team hoped the trip would boost him at home, that hasn't happened. He looks weak abroad, and these are not good signals.'
" 'My impression is that he'll be very happy to get home,' Pastor said."
Bush in Virginia
Bush stopped off in Richmond last night on his way home from South America to headline a spirited, election-eve rally for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore.
Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "In jumping into the Virginia governor's race just 10 hours before polling booths open, President Bush put his credibility on the line last night and ensured that the results will be interpreted as a referendum on his troubled presidency. But the White House is gambling that after weeks of political tribulations, Bush has little more to lose. . . .
"White House strategists evidently calculated that a Kilgore defeat would be seen as a defeat for Bush even if the president did not set foot on the southern side of the Potomac . . . [while] if Kilgore wins, it would offer a well-timed vindication of Bush's clout. . . .
"The picture on most front pages and television newscasts today will feature Bush and Kilgore together. Democrats are wagering that the pairing actually will help drive their own base to the polls, working in [Democratic nominee Tim] Kaine's favor."
Here is the transcript of Bush's remarks.
Mike Allen writes for Time: "The President, who can be tired and cranky after an overseas foray, basked in the adulation, grinning, doling out 360-degree waves and giving his full-body chuckle as if someone were tickling him. As he waited for the applause to die down, he looked happier than he had any time since his triumphal post-election news conference a year and three days earlier. . . .
"Bush pulled out all the stops, calling Kilgore 'Governor' and kissing the ladies onstage. 'I like a guy who loves his wife -- I sure love mine,' Bush said, to applause, standing in front of a huge 'Victory For Virginia' placard. His 18 minutes of remarks laid it on thick, saying that Kilgore, who had been tortured in the press for his mountain twang, 'doesn't have a lot of fancy airs' and is 'a down-to-earth person.' . . .
"Kilgore told Time what a thrill it had been to greet Bush at the foot of the Air Force One stairs, then ride to the hangar in the limo with the president and the first lady. 'He was in the most fantastic mood when he got off that plane,' Kilgore recalled. 'The President said, "You make the decision, Jerry: Tie, or no tie?'' The President had come down the stairs of the plane tieless, and that's usually the time when the local guy takes off his own. But Kilgore didn't get that memo. 'I already had a tie, so he followed my fashion advice,' Kilgore said."
Traveling Man
Nedra Pickler writes for the Associated Press: "Bush returned from Panama late Monday at the end of a five-day trip that included a hemispheric summit in Argentina and was leaving for an eight-day trip to Asia on Nov. 14. That gives him precious little time to work on his domestic agenda, help win support for replacement Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito and deal with the fallout from the CIA leak case that involved two of his top aides.
"Between his foreign visits, a trip home to Texas for the Thanksgiving holiday and other domestic travel in between, Bush will spend roughly two-thirds of November away from the White House."
Bush-Cheney Rift?
Thomas M. DeFrank writes in the New York Daily News: "The CIA leak scandal has peeled back the veil on the most closely held White House secret of all: the subtle but unmistakable erosion in the bond between President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
"Multiple sources close to Bush told the Daily News that while the vice president remains his boss' valued political partner and counselor, his clout has lessened -- primarily as a result of issues arising from the Iraq war.
" 'The relationship is not what it was,' a presidential counselor said. 'There has been some distance for some time.' "
"A senior administration official termed any such suggestion 'categorically false.' "
The Cheney Factor
The New York Times editorial board is blunt: "After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long."
Their suggestion for a Bush comeback: "Mr. Bush cannot fire Mr. Cheney, but he could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now."
Daniel Benjamin writes in Slate: "It has become a cliche to say that Dick Cheney is the most powerful vice president in American history. Nonetheless, here is a prediction: When the historians really get digging into the paper entrails of the Bush administration -- or possibly when Scooter Libby goes on trial -- those who have intoned that phrase will still be astonished at the extent to which the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney was the center of power inside the White House -- and at the grip it had on foreign and defense policy."
James Carroll writes in a Boston Globe op-ed column: "The indictment of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States."
Here's one of Carroll's anecdotes: "When the World Trade Center towers were hit in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. . . .
"The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Cheney warned the president that a 'specific threat' had targeted Air Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it."
Karl Rove Watch
John McCaslin writes in the Washington Times: "Having dodged indictment in the CIA leak scandal, White House senior adviser Karl Rove Thursday will stand before a roomful of judges and lawyers -- as keynote speaker of the Federalist Society's 2005 National Lawyers Convention."
Novak Watch
Don Kaplan writes in the New York Post: "Columnist Robert Novak appears to be done at CNN."
Secret Sycophants
Howard Kurtz writes in his washingtonpost.com blog this morning about one of his pet peeves: "It's bad enough that journalists overuse and abuse unnamed sources who either rip their rivals or say something critical of their own operation, but at least there is a patina of a rationale -- namely, that no one, at least in politics, would make such utterances on the record.
"But saying something positive about your own side? Why on earth should we drape a cloak of anonymity around such people?"
Bush's Tortured Logic
By Dan Froomkin
Special to washingtonpost.com
Tuesday, November 8, 2005; 11:59 AM
Just what did President Bush mean yesterday when he said: "We don't torture?"
News outlets all over the world reported Bush's words as if they were definitive. But they are in fact enigmatic at best, because it's not at all clear what the president's definition of torture is.
White House Briefing
Bush's Tortured Logic
His comments came yesterday in a press availability with President Martin Torrijos in Panama, in response to a question about secret CIA prison camps and Vice President Cheney's crusade against legislation that would prohibit U.S. government employees from using cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.
But if we don't torture, then why is the White House fighting tooth and nail against a law that would say as much? Why are those prison camps secret? And what are we to make of the widespread, documented practice of prisoner abuse? Bush wouldn't say. And he didn't take any follow-up questions.
Here's the full text of the exchange:
"Q Mr. President, there has been a bit of an international outcry over reports of secret U.S. prisons in Europe for terrorism suspects. Will you let the Red Cross have access to them? And do you agree with Vice President Cheney that the CIA should be exempt from legislation to ban torture?
"PRESIDENT BUSH: Our country is at war, and our government has the obligation to protect the American people. The executive branch has the obligation to protect the American people; the legislative branch has the obligation to protect the American people. And we are aggressively doing that. We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information about where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any activity we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture.
"And, therefore, we're working with Congress to make sure that as we go forward, we make it possible -- more possible to do our job. There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans, and wants to hurt America again. And so, you bet, we'll aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law. And that's why you're seeing members of my administration go and brief the Congress. We want to work together in this matter. We -- all of us have an obligation, and it's a solemn obligation and a solemn responsibility. And I'm confident that when people see the facts, that they'll recognize that we've -- they've got more work to do, and that we must protect ourselves in a way that is lawful."
Leave it to the bloggers to slice and dice:
Andrew Sullivan writes: "If that's the case, why threaten to veto a law that would simply codify what Bush alleges is already the current policy? If 'we do not torture,' how to account for the hundreds and hundreds of cases of abuse and torture by U.S. troops, documented by the government itself? If 'we do not torture,' why the memos that expanded exponentially the lee-way given to the military to abuse detainees in order to get intelligence? The president's only defense against being a liar is that he is defining 'torture' in such a way that no other reasonable person on the planet, apart from Bush's own torture apologists (and they are now down to one who will say so publicly), would agree. The press must now ask the president: does he regard the repeated, forcible near-drowning of detainees to be torture? Does he believe that tying naked detainees up and leaving them outside all night to die of hypothermia is 'torture'? Does he believe that beating the legs of a detainee until they are pulp and he dies is torture? Does he believe that beating detainees till they die is torture? Does he believe that using someone's religious faith against them in interrogations is 'cruel, inhumane and degrading' treatment and thereby illegal? What is his definition of torture?"
Bob Cesca writes on Huffingtonpost.com: "He's either outright lying or the administration has a very different definition of torture than the rest of the world. I would argue that it's both."
Steven C. Clemons writes: "Bush seems to think that his personal assessment about what is within the interests of the United States should be good enough for the citizens of the United States. The problem is that the American public doubts the Bush team's truthfulness -- particularly after the lies and mistruths that Scooter Libby and Karl Rove offered to colleagues like Scott McClellan, Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald, and the American public in the Valerie Plame outing case."
Clemons also excerpts from the influential Nelson Report, in which Chris Nelson writes that Bush appears to be claiming that when the facts come out, "we will discover that whatever torture which took place was done strictly according to his Administration's legal guidelines.
"And that, of course, goes to the crux of the matter . . . the President's infamous 'torture memo' which authorized CIA and military interrogators to torture someone up to but not past the point of 'organ failure and death' in order to make them talk. A friend with an interesting intelligence analysis approach to all this suggests: 'Bush sincerely, albeit conveniently, believes physical abuse without intent to cause permanent injury or loss to vital organs is not torture, and believes the CIA black op is staying within boundaries most of the time.' (The best historical analogy: 'I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.') Maybe . . . but even if true, it's hardly exculpation."
The Coverage
Michael A. Fletcher writes in The Washington Post: "President Bush, defending a clandestine U.S. prison system abroad for terrorism suspects, said Monday that his administration would continue to aggressively battle terrorism in sometimes unconventional but always lawful ways."
Richard Benedetto writes in USA Today: "U.S. interrogation practices have been under fire since news accounts in 2004 reported harsh tactics by U.S. interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay in Cuba and at detention facilities in Afghanistan. In a new case announced Monday, five Army Rangers were charged with abusing detainees in Iraq. . . .
"Over White House opposition, the Senate voted 90-9 last month to approve an amendment by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would ban the use of torture. Vice President Cheney has pushed for an exemption for the CIA.
"The administration has said in a statement that while it does not condone torture, it opposes the measure because it would be 'unnecessary or duplicative' and could restrict 'the president's ability to conduct the war (on terrorism) effectively under existing law.' "
Kenneth R. Bazinet writes in the New York Daily News: "Despite repeated allegations of prisoner abuse, President Bush claimed yesterday the U.S. doesn't use torture, but he still argued against a proposed congressional ban on the practice. . . .
"But on the same day that Bush disavowed the use of torture, new allegations of prisoner abuse by U.S. troops erupted in Baghdad."
Warren P. Strobel and James Kuhnhenn write for Knight Ridder Newspapers: "Nineteen months after the first revelations of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison, the Bush administration's position on treating detainees is increasingly under fire.
"[A] growing number of lawmakers, both moderate Republicans and Democrats, argue that abuse of prisoners is immoral, has devastated the United States' image and ability to project its values overseas, and would endanger captured American soldiers or civilians."
Separation of Powers on Trial
Charles Lane writes in The Washington Post: "The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to rule on the legality of the Bush administration's planned military commissions for accused terrorists, setting up what could be one of the most significant rulings on presidential war powers since the end of World War II.
"President Bush has claimed broad power to conduct the war against al Qaeda and said that questions about the detention of suspected terrorists, their interrogation, trial and punishment are matters for him to decide as commander in chief.
"But the court's announcement that it would hear the case of Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, shows that the justices feel the judicial branch has a role to play as well. The court has focused on whether Bush has the power to set up the commissions and whether detainees facing military trials can go to court in the United States to secure the protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions."
Linda Greenhouse writes in the New York Times: "Mr. Hamdan's lawyers, Professor Neal K. Katyal of Georgetown University Law Center and Lt. Cmdr. Charles Swift, argue that the president's executive action establishing the military commissions was simply without authorization.
" 'The president's unilateral creation of commissions,' they argue, 'his single-handed definition of the offenses and persons subject to their jurisdiction, and his promulgation of the rules of procedure combine to violate separation of powers.' They add: 'The Revolution was fought to ensure that no man, or branch of government, could be so powerful.' "
Beyond the Paper Trail
Walter Pincus writes in The Washington Post: "Democrats on the Senate intelligence committee want the right to interview top policymakers or speechwriters as part of the inquiry into whether the Bush administration exaggerated or misused intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), the panel's vice chairman, said yesterday.
"Rockefeller raised the possibility of issuing subpoenas, and outlined a more wide-ranging approach than the one described by Committee Chairman Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), who said the work would center on comparing public statements by administration officials to intelligence reports circulating at the time. Rockefeller, Roberts and four other senators are to meet today to work out a schedule and process for the committee's review."
Robert Scheer writes in his Los Angeles Times column: "Who in the White House knew about DITSUM No. 044-02 and when did they know it?
"That's the newly declassified smoking-gun document, originally prepared by the Defense Intelligence Agency in February 2002 but ignored by President Bush. Its declassification this weekend blows another huge hole in Bush's claim that he was acting on the best intelligence available when he pitched the invasion of Iraq as a way to prevent an Al Qaeda terror attack using weapons of mass destruction."
On MSNBC, Chris Matthews last night kicked off a full week of shows devoted to the CIA leak case with a look back at how the case for war was sold in the first place.
Matthews: "Three years ago, the White House persuaded the media, Republicans and Democrats in Congress, and a majority of the American people to accept their case for military action in Iraq -- largely based on a very powerful image, a nuclear mushroom cloud. The president, the vice president and others repeatedly warned of the looming threat of a nuclear weapon in Saddam Hussein`s arsenal that could be used against the territory of the United States."
Here's David Shuster's report on how that happened.
No-Pardon Pledge?
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid yesterday called on President Bush to affirmatively state that he will not pardon any of the people involved in the leaking of classified information.
Arianna Huffington writes in her blog: "According to the pundits, a pardon is a done deal. All that's up for grabs is the timing.
"Will it be after Scooter changes his plea to guilty, thus pulling the plug on a trial -- and robbing us of the pleasure of seeing Dick Cheney on the stand, under oath, being grilled on WMD, aluminum tubes, the WHIG, and the campaign to smear Joe Wilson? Or will Bush follow in the footsteps of his father's pardon of Cap Weinberger, and give Libby his presidential Stay Out of Jail Free card preemptively, before he even has to admit to any wrongdoing?
"Of course, there is a third option: Bush assenting to Reid's request and taking the pardon option off the table. That would be the best way to offer the American people the chance to finally learn the truth -- which after all, is what the president has repeatedly said he is after. . . .
"I hear that a number of powerful Democratic senators are working behind the scenes on a plan to force the issue."
The End of a Bad Trip
Edwin Chen writes in the Los Angeles Times: "Before Bush left for his visit to Argentina -- where he attended the Summit of the Americas -- Brazil and Panama, some analysts thought the trip abroad might help him shake off political troubles in Washington and put him in a statesmanlike setting. But afterward, several said the trip was far from a ringing success.
" 'The trip hasn't helped at all in Latin America. It reduced his stature in Latin America,' said David de Ferranti, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank. 'To the extent that the Bush team hoped the trip would boost him at home, that hasn't happened. He looks weak abroad, and these are not good signals.'
" 'My impression is that he'll be very happy to get home,' Pastor said."
Bush in Virginia
Bush stopped off in Richmond last night on his way home from South America to headline a spirited, election-eve rally for Virginia gubernatorial candidate Jerry Kilgore.
Peter Baker writes in The Washington Post: "In jumping into the Virginia governor's race just 10 hours before polling booths open, President Bush put his credibility on the line last night and ensured that the results will be interpreted as a referendum on his troubled presidency. But the White House is gambling that after weeks of political tribulations, Bush has little more to lose. . . .
"White House strategists evidently calculated that a Kilgore defeat would be seen as a defeat for Bush even if the president did not set foot on the southern side of the Potomac . . . [while] if Kilgore wins, it would offer a well-timed vindication of Bush's clout. . . .
"The picture on most front pages and television newscasts today will feature Bush and Kilgore together. Democrats are wagering that the pairing actually will help drive their own base to the polls, working in [Democratic nominee Tim] Kaine's favor."
Here is the transcript of Bush's remarks.
Mike Allen writes for Time: "The President, who can be tired and cranky after an overseas foray, basked in the adulation, grinning, doling out 360-degree waves and giving his full-body chuckle as if someone were tickling him. As he waited for the applause to die down, he looked happier than he had any time since his triumphal post-election news conference a year and three days earlier. . . .
"Bush pulled out all the stops, calling Kilgore 'Governor' and kissing the ladies onstage. 'I like a guy who loves his wife -- I sure love mine,' Bush said, to applause, standing in front of a huge 'Victory For Virginia' placard. His 18 minutes of remarks laid it on thick, saying that Kilgore, who had been tortured in the press for his mountain twang, 'doesn't have a lot of fancy airs' and is 'a down-to-earth person.' . . .
"Kilgore told Time what a thrill it had been to greet Bush at the foot of the Air Force One stairs, then ride to the hangar in the limo with the president and the first lady. 'He was in the most fantastic mood when he got off that plane,' Kilgore recalled. 'The President said, "You make the decision, Jerry: Tie, or no tie?'' The President had come down the stairs of the plane tieless, and that's usually the time when the local guy takes off his own. But Kilgore didn't get that memo. 'I already had a tie, so he followed my fashion advice,' Kilgore said."
Traveling Man
Nedra Pickler writes for the Associated Press: "Bush returned from Panama late Monday at the end of a five-day trip that included a hemispheric summit in Argentina and was leaving for an eight-day trip to Asia on Nov. 14. That gives him precious little time to work on his domestic agenda, help win support for replacement Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito and deal with the fallout from the CIA leak case that involved two of his top aides.
"Between his foreign visits, a trip home to Texas for the Thanksgiving holiday and other domestic travel in between, Bush will spend roughly two-thirds of November away from the White House."
Bush-Cheney Rift?
Thomas M. DeFrank writes in the New York Daily News: "The CIA leak scandal has peeled back the veil on the most closely held White House secret of all: the subtle but unmistakable erosion in the bond between President Bush and Vice President Cheney.
"Multiple sources close to Bush told the Daily News that while the vice president remains his boss' valued political partner and counselor, his clout has lessened -- primarily as a result of issues arising from the Iraq war.
" 'The relationship is not what it was,' a presidential counselor said. 'There has been some distance for some time.' "
"A senior administration official termed any such suggestion 'categorically false.' "
The Cheney Factor
The New York Times editorial board is blunt: "After President Bush's disastrous visit to Latin America, it's unnerving to realize that his presidency still has more than three years to run. An administration with no agenda and no competence would be hard enough to live with on the domestic front. But the rest of the world simply can't afford an American government this bad for that long."
Their suggestion for a Bush comeback: "Mr. Bush cannot fire Mr. Cheney, but he could do what other presidents have done to vice presidents: keep him too busy attending funerals and acting as the chairman of studies to do more harm. Mr. Bush would still have to turn his administration around, but it would at least send a signal to the nation and the world that he was in charge, and the next three years might not be as dreadful as they threaten to be right now."
Daniel Benjamin writes in Slate: "It has become a cliche to say that Dick Cheney is the most powerful vice president in American history. Nonetheless, here is a prediction: When the historians really get digging into the paper entrails of the Bush administration -- or possibly when Scooter Libby goes on trial -- those who have intoned that phrase will still be astonished at the extent to which the Office of Vice President Dick Cheney was the center of power inside the White House -- and at the grip it had on foreign and defense policy."
James Carroll writes in a Boston Globe op-ed column: "The indictment of the vice president's chief of staff for perjury and obstruction of justice is an occasion to consider just how damaging the long public career of Richard Cheney has been to the United States."
Here's one of Carroll's anecdotes: "When the World Trade Center towers were hit in New York, it was Cheney who told a shaken President Bush to flee. . . .
"The 9/11 Commission found that, from the White House situation room, Cheney warned the president that a 'specific threat' had targeted Air Force One, prompting Bush to spend the day hiding in the bunker at Offut Air Force Base in Nebraska. There was no specific threat. In Bush's absence, Cheney, implying an authorizing telephone call from the president, took command of the nation's response to the crisis. There was no authorizing telephone call. The 9/11 Commission declined to make an issue of Cheney's usurpation of powers, but the record shows it."
Karl Rove Watch
John McCaslin writes in the Washington Times: "Having dodged indictment in the CIA leak scandal, White House senior adviser Karl Rove Thursday will stand before a roomful of judges and lawyers -- as keynote speaker of the Federalist Society's 2005 National Lawyers Convention."
Novak Watch
Don Kaplan writes in the New York Post: "Columnist Robert Novak appears to be done at CNN."
Secret Sycophants
Howard Kurtz writes in his washingtonpost.com blog this morning about one of his pet peeves: "It's bad enough that journalists overuse and abuse unnamed sources who either rip their rivals or say something critical of their own operation, but at least there is a patina of a rationale -- namely, that no one, at least in politics, would make such utterances on the record.
"But saying something positive about your own side? Why on earth should we drape a cloak of anonymity around such people?"
High Court To Hear Case On War Powers
By Charles Lane
The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to rule on the legality of the Bush administration's planned military commissions for accused terrorists, setting up what could be one of the most significant rulings on presidential war powers since the end of World War II.
President Bush has claimed broad power to conduct the war against al Qaeda and said that questions about the detention of suspected terrorists, their interrogation, trial and punishment are matters for him to decide as commander in chief.
But the court's announcement that it would hear the case of Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, shows that the justices feel the judicial branch has a role to play as well. The court has focused on whether Bush has the power to set up the commissions and whether detainees facing military trials can go to court in the United States to secure the protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions.
The justices have chosen to intervene at a sensitive time for the Bush administration. The Senate is mounting its first sustained challenge to the administration's claim that it alone can determine what interrogation methods are proper for detainees. The United States has come under fire after disclosures that the CIA has been interrogating suspects at secret "black sites" in Eastern Europe.
All of that will be in the background as the court considers a case that will turn on its view of whether the other branches of government can and should permit the executive branch to make all the rules in the battle against al Qaeda.
"The discomfort some justices may have with U.S. foreign policy is bound to lap over" into their views of the legal issues, said Michael J. Glennon, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. "There is no question the justices live in this world and they read the newspapers."
Both issues -- military commissions and the Geneva Conventions -- are intertwined and go back to the earliest days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The administration's approach to them helped generate some of the first policy debates of the war, inside and outside the administration.
On Nov. 13, 2001, Bush issued a "military order" declaring that panels of military officers would try suspected terrorists for violations of the laws of war. The administration argued that military trials are necessary because the regular processes of civilian justice cannot deal with a shadowy foe such as al Qaeda. It says the president has the power to establish commissions under his constitutional authority as commander in chief, the Sept. 18, 2001, congressional resolution that authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and other statutes.
Under regulations developed by the Pentagon in response to early criticisms of the commissions, defendants before military commissions would enjoy a presumption of innocence, access to a lawyer and other protections.
Also early on in the war, the White House decided, over the strong objections of the State Department, that suspected al Qaeda terrorists captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere should not be entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They are not prisoners of war but "unlawful combatants" for whom the conventions offer no legal benefits, the administration says. As a result, they can be tried before military commissions, rather than court-martials, which offer more procedural protections.
But Hamdan's attorneys argue that Congress authorized the president to detain enemy combatants -- not to try them. Any commissions would have to be established with Congress's express approval, or else they could be changed and manipulated by the president alone, they argue.
In their brief to the court, Hamdan's lawyers argue that the Geneva Conventions entitle their client to an impartial hearing to determine whether he qualifies as a prisoner of war, and to a court-martial -- unless he is found to be an unlawful combatant. Hamdan's tribunal began in August 2004 but was halted by U.S. District Judge James Robertson in Washington.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, including now Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., overturned Robertson in July; Roberts has recused himself in Hamdan's appeal to the Supreme Court. For a time, it seemed as if the court might honor the administration's request that it stay out of the dispute. The case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , No. 05-184, had languished on the court's weekly conference agenda for about a month, suggesting that the justices were preparing to rebuff Hamdan's appeal. The former aide to Osama bin Laden is at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and is charged with conspiring to commit terrorist acts.
"It's a little surprising, because one would have thought the court would have wanted to see whether Hamdan was found not guilty," Glennon said. "Therefore, the court seems disinclined to sit by the sidelines and defer to the executive's judgment as to what rule ought to govern."
An oral argument is scheduled for March and a decision due by July. A 4 to 4 tie would result in the affirmation of the lower court's ruling, which upheld the administration's policies. That outcome would probably permit the trials to go ahead, but it would not create a binding legal precedent.
The government says Hamdan, one of about 500 terrorist suspects imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, was bin Laden's confidant and bodyguard from 1996 to 2001 and helped transfer weapons from Taliban stockpiles to al Qaeda. But Hamdan says he was a mere chauffeur. He says that he has cooperated with U.S. interrogators but that they have mistreated him and held him in solitary confinement since December 2003.
Also yesterday, Defense Department officials announced that charges have been approved for five more "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay and that they could face military commissions soon.
The department said charges will go forward against Ghassan Abdullah Sharbi and Jabran Said bin Qahtani of Saudi Arabia; Sufyian Barhoumi of Algeria; Binyam Ahmed Muhammad of Ethiopia; and Omar Ahmed Khadr of Canada.
Four are charged with conspiracy to attack civilians, attack objects, murder, terrorism and destruction of property. Khadr is charged with conspiracy to murder and attempted murder, and with "aiding the enemy," according to a military statement.
According to military documents, Khadr is a juvenile who has admitted being trained at al Qaeda camps and claims to have planted land mines in Afghanistan and to have killed a U.S. soldier there.
The others have been linked to international terrorism and allegedly trained in al Qaeda camps, associated with top terrorist leaders or were known to U.S. officials as possibly training for attacks here.
Like Hamdan, some of the detainees have claimed abuse by U.S. soldiers.
In another development, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said he hopes to add language to the defense authorization bill that would eliminate habeas rights for detainees captured during the terrorism fight to halt the "the never-ending litigation that is coming from Guantanamo."
Graham, who has also proposed an amendment that would put the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay under congressional supervision, said his package -- combined with Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) that limits U.S. interrogation practices -- would allow the United States to "regain the moral high ground" in the war.
Staff writer Josh White and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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By Charles Lane
The Supreme Court yesterday agreed to rule on the legality of the Bush administration's planned military commissions for accused terrorists, setting up what could be one of the most significant rulings on presidential war powers since the end of World War II.
President Bush has claimed broad power to conduct the war against al Qaeda and said that questions about the detention of suspected terrorists, their interrogation, trial and punishment are matters for him to decide as commander in chief.
But the court's announcement that it would hear the case of Osama bin Laden's former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, shows that the justices feel the judicial branch has a role to play as well. The court has focused on whether Bush has the power to set up the commissions and whether detainees facing military trials can go to court in the United States to secure the protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions.
The justices have chosen to intervene at a sensitive time for the Bush administration. The Senate is mounting its first sustained challenge to the administration's claim that it alone can determine what interrogation methods are proper for detainees. The United States has come under fire after disclosures that the CIA has been interrogating suspects at secret "black sites" in Eastern Europe.
All of that will be in the background as the court considers a case that will turn on its view of whether the other branches of government can and should permit the executive branch to make all the rules in the battle against al Qaeda.
"The discomfort some justices may have with U.S. foreign policy is bound to lap over" into their views of the legal issues, said Michael J. Glennon, a professor of international law at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University. "There is no question the justices live in this world and they read the newspapers."
Both issues -- military commissions and the Geneva Conventions -- are intertwined and go back to the earliest days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. The administration's approach to them helped generate some of the first policy debates of the war, inside and outside the administration.
On Nov. 13, 2001, Bush issued a "military order" declaring that panels of military officers would try suspected terrorists for violations of the laws of war. The administration argued that military trials are necessary because the regular processes of civilian justice cannot deal with a shadowy foe such as al Qaeda. It says the president has the power to establish commissions under his constitutional authority as commander in chief, the Sept. 18, 2001, congressional resolution that authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and other statutes.
Under regulations developed by the Pentagon in response to early criticisms of the commissions, defendants before military commissions would enjoy a presumption of innocence, access to a lawyer and other protections.
Also early on in the war, the White House decided, over the strong objections of the State Department, that suspected al Qaeda terrorists captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere should not be entitled to the protections of the Geneva Conventions. They are not prisoners of war but "unlawful combatants" for whom the conventions offer no legal benefits, the administration says. As a result, they can be tried before military commissions, rather than court-martials, which offer more procedural protections.
But Hamdan's attorneys argue that Congress authorized the president to detain enemy combatants -- not to try them. Any commissions would have to be established with Congress's express approval, or else they could be changed and manipulated by the president alone, they argue.
In their brief to the court, Hamdan's lawyers argue that the Geneva Conventions entitle their client to an impartial hearing to determine whether he qualifies as a prisoner of war, and to a court-martial -- unless he is found to be an unlawful combatant. Hamdan's tribunal began in August 2004 but was halted by U.S. District Judge James Robertson in Washington.
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, including now Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., overturned Robertson in July; Roberts has recused himself in Hamdan's appeal to the Supreme Court. For a time, it seemed as if the court might honor the administration's request that it stay out of the dispute. The case, Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , No. 05-184, had languished on the court's weekly conference agenda for about a month, suggesting that the justices were preparing to rebuff Hamdan's appeal. The former aide to Osama bin Laden is at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and is charged with conspiring to commit terrorist acts.
"It's a little surprising, because one would have thought the court would have wanted to see whether Hamdan was found not guilty," Glennon said. "Therefore, the court seems disinclined to sit by the sidelines and defer to the executive's judgment as to what rule ought to govern."
An oral argument is scheduled for March and a decision due by July. A 4 to 4 tie would result in the affirmation of the lower court's ruling, which upheld the administration's policies. That outcome would probably permit the trials to go ahead, but it would not create a binding legal precedent.
The government says Hamdan, one of about 500 terrorist suspects imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, was bin Laden's confidant and bodyguard from 1996 to 2001 and helped transfer weapons from Taliban stockpiles to al Qaeda. But Hamdan says he was a mere chauffeur. He says that he has cooperated with U.S. interrogators but that they have mistreated him and held him in solitary confinement since December 2003.
Also yesterday, Defense Department officials announced that charges have been approved for five more "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay and that they could face military commissions soon.
The department said charges will go forward against Ghassan Abdullah Sharbi and Jabran Said bin Qahtani of Saudi Arabia; Sufyian Barhoumi of Algeria; Binyam Ahmed Muhammad of Ethiopia; and Omar Ahmed Khadr of Canada.
Four are charged with conspiracy to attack civilians, attack objects, murder, terrorism and destruction of property. Khadr is charged with conspiracy to murder and attempted murder, and with "aiding the enemy," according to a military statement.
According to military documents, Khadr is a juvenile who has admitted being trained at al Qaeda camps and claims to have planted land mines in Afghanistan and to have killed a U.S. soldier there.
The others have been linked to international terrorism and allegedly trained in al Qaeda camps, associated with top terrorist leaders or were known to U.S. officials as possibly training for attacks here.
Like Hamdan, some of the detainees have claimed abuse by U.S. soldiers.
In another development, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.), a member of the Armed Services Committee, said he hopes to add language to the defense authorization bill that would eliminate habeas rights for detainees captured during the terrorism fight to halt the "the never-ending litigation that is coming from Guantanamo."
Graham, who has also proposed an amendment that would put the military tribunals at Guantanamo Bay under congressional supervision, said his package -- combined with Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) that limits U.S. interrogation practices -- would allow the United States to "regain the moral high ground" in the war.
Staff writer Josh White and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.
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http://rawstory.com/news/2005/Senator_tell...lican_1108.html
QUOTE
Senator tells CNN he believes Republican leaked info on CIA jails
11/08/2005 @ 3:40 pm
Filed by RAW STORY
Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) told CNN's Ed Henry Tuesday afternoon that he believed it was a Republican senator who gave information about secret CIA jails abroad to the Washington Post, RAW STORY can report.
Lott said that much of the information contained in the Post report -- which stated that the U.S. was holding terrorist suspects in secret CIA jails overseas -- was discussed at a meeting of Republican senators last Tuesday.
The revelation appears to torpedo the political gambit of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) who called on the Senate and House intelligence committees to investigate who leaked the information to the Post.
The Post story cited as sources "U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement."
More via Eschaton.
CNN's Ed Henry: "Trent Lott stunned reporters by declaring that this subject was actualy discussed at a Senate Republican luncheon, Republican senators only, last tuesday the day before the story ran in the Washington Post. Lott noted that Vice President Cheney was also in the room for that discussion and Lott said point blank "a lot of it came out of that room last tuesday, pointing to the room where the lunch was held in the capitol." He added of senators "we can't keep our mouths shut." He added about the vice president, "He was up here last wek and talked up here in that room right there in a roomful of nothing but senators and every word that was said in there went right to the newspaper." He said he believes when all is said and done it may wind up as an ethics investigation of a Republican senator, maybe a Republican staffer as well. Senator Frist's office not commenting on this development. The Washington Post not commenting either."
11/08/2005 @ 3:40 pm
Filed by RAW STORY
Senator Trent Lott (R-MS) told CNN's Ed Henry Tuesday afternoon that he believed it was a Republican senator who gave information about secret CIA jails abroad to the Washington Post, RAW STORY can report.
Lott said that much of the information contained in the Post report -- which stated that the U.S. was holding terrorist suspects in secret CIA jails overseas -- was discussed at a meeting of Republican senators last Tuesday.
The revelation appears to torpedo the political gambit of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-TN) and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-IL) who called on the Senate and House intelligence committees to investigate who leaked the information to the Post.
The Post story cited as sources "U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement."
More via Eschaton.
CNN's Ed Henry: "Trent Lott stunned reporters by declaring that this subject was actualy discussed at a Senate Republican luncheon, Republican senators only, last tuesday the day before the story ran in the Washington Post. Lott noted that Vice President Cheney was also in the room for that discussion and Lott said point blank "a lot of it came out of that room last tuesday, pointing to the room where the lunch was held in the capitol." He added of senators "we can't keep our mouths shut." He added about the vice president, "He was up here last wek and talked up here in that room right there in a roomful of nothing but senators and every word that was said in there went right to the newspaper." He said he believes when all is said and done it may wind up as an ethics investigation of a Republican senator, maybe a Republican staffer as well. Senator Frist's office not commenting on this development. The Washington Post not commenting either."
Well, well, well.
I think that they are hoping that it is McCain or Hagel who leaked the information.
I commented in another thread that they may have made a mistake by asking for hearings on this. It might just open the door to a full scale investigate into the abuse of prisoners (IF enough people demand it).
I commented in another thread that they may have made a mistake by asking for hearings on this. It might just open the door to a full scale investigate into the abuse of prisoners (IF enough people demand it).
QUOTE(rox63 @ Nov 8 2005, 07:33 PM)
uh, thanks for the confirmation Senator on what Cheney discussed in that meeting. Yeah, I guess some of you can't keep your mouth closed.
Snuffy posted this in the Congress forum.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051108/pl_nm/...s_congress_dc_4
Congress may probe leaks in CIA prisons story By Vicki Allen
Top U.S. Republican lawmakers on Tuesday called for a congressional investigation into leaks of information used by The Washington Post in an article on the CIA's secret global prison system.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert in a letter asked the intelligence committees to "immediately initiate a joint investigation into the possible release of classified information."
Democrats said instead of just investigating possible leaks related to that story, Republicans should allow a broad investigation on detainee abuses and whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence before the Iraq war.
"If the speaker and the majority leader in the Senate are interested in this, they should join with us in getting to the bottom of what went on in bringing this country to war," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.
Democrats had pushed for an independent commission to investigate abuses of terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. But voting 55-43, the Senate largely on party lines rejected the commission in an amendment to a defense policy bill.
Democrats said an independent review was essential to determine whether Bush administration policies led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and elsewhere, but Republicans said the Pentagon already had conducted investigations and prosecutions were ongoing.
The Washington Post reported last week that the CIA has been holding and interrogating al Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe, part of a global covert prison system established after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The Bush administration has not confirmed or denied the report.
In their letter, Frist of Tennessee and Hastert of Illinois said they wanted the intelligence committees to determine if the information given to the newspaper was classified and accurate, who leaked it and under what authority, and the actual and potential national security damage from it.
Asked whether the Republican leaders would seek an investigation of the secret prisons, Ron Bonjean, Hastert's spokesman, said, "First we're looking into why we have people leaking classified information."
LOTT CLARIFIES REMARKS
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the probe was the lawmakers' idea, not the administration's.
"The leaking of classified information is a serious matter. It ought to be taken seriously," McClellan said. "But this is a congressional prerogative and it was a decision that was made by those leaders and that's the way I would describe it."
Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott (news, bio, voting record), who caused a stir by saying a Senate staffer may have provided information for the story, later said he was talking about the issue of detainee torture, not secret prisons. "Two different issues but they do get kind of interwoven," he told reporters.
But Lott questioned whether a congressional probe of potential leaks was a good idea. "I don't see how we have the time or how we get into that without getting into all of it."
Democrats and some Republicans have cited The Washington Post story as another reason Congress must set rules for the treatment of military detainees in the wake of the scandal over physical and sexual abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The Senate has passed an amendment barring torture of detainees and setting standards for their treatment and interrogations, despite the White House's threat to veto a $440 billion defense spending bill if it contained the measure.
The House has not yet voted on that measure.
President George W. Bush has been dogged by questions over the Pentagon's and the CIA's treatment of terrorism suspects. Responding to questions on Monday in Panama, Bush said, "We do not torture," and defended his administration's efforts to stop Congress from imposing rules on prisoner treatment.
The administration also has been hit by the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on five counts of obstructing justice, perjury and lying in the two-year probe into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity after her husband criticized the Iraq war.
(additional reporting by Joanne Kenen, Susan Cornwell, Thomas Ferraro and Caren Bohan)
Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20051108/pl_nm/...s_congress_dc_4
Congress may probe leaks in CIA prisons story By Vicki Allen
Top U.S. Republican lawmakers on Tuesday called for a congressional investigation into leaks of information used by The Washington Post in an article on the CIA's secret global prison system.
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist and House of Representatives Speaker Dennis Hastert in a letter asked the intelligence committees to "immediately initiate a joint investigation into the possible release of classified information."
Democrats said instead of just investigating possible leaks related to that story, Republicans should allow a broad investigation on detainee abuses and whether the Bush administration manipulated intelligence before the Iraq war.
"If the speaker and the majority leader in the Senate are interested in this, they should join with us in getting to the bottom of what went on in bringing this country to war," said Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat.
Democrats had pushed for an independent commission to investigate abuses of terrorism suspects in U.S. custody. But voting 55-43, the Senate largely on party lines rejected the commission in an amendment to a defense policy bill.
Democrats said an independent review was essential to determine whether Bush administration policies led to the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and elsewhere, but Republicans said the Pentagon already had conducted investigations and prosecutions were ongoing.
The Washington Post reported last week that the CIA has been holding and interrogating al Qaeda captives at a secret facility in Eastern Europe, part of a global covert prison system established after the September 11, 2001, attacks.
The Bush administration has not confirmed or denied the report.
In their letter, Frist of Tennessee and Hastert of Illinois said they wanted the intelligence committees to determine if the information given to the newspaper was classified and accurate, who leaked it and under what authority, and the actual and potential national security damage from it.
Asked whether the Republican leaders would seek an investigation of the secret prisons, Ron Bonjean, Hastert's spokesman, said, "First we're looking into why we have people leaking classified information."
LOTT CLARIFIES REMARKS
White House spokesman Scott McClellan said the probe was the lawmakers' idea, not the administration's.
"The leaking of classified information is a serious matter. It ought to be taken seriously," McClellan said. "But this is a congressional prerogative and it was a decision that was made by those leaders and that's the way I would describe it."
Mississippi Republican Sen. Trent Lott (news, bio, voting record), who caused a stir by saying a Senate staffer may have provided information for the story, later said he was talking about the issue of detainee torture, not secret prisons. "Two different issues but they do get kind of interwoven," he told reporters.
But Lott questioned whether a congressional probe of potential leaks was a good idea. "I don't see how we have the time or how we get into that without getting into all of it."
Democrats and some Republicans have cited The Washington Post story as another reason Congress must set rules for the treatment of military detainees in the wake of the scandal over physical and sexual abuse at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.
The Senate has passed an amendment barring torture of detainees and setting standards for their treatment and interrogations, despite the White House's threat to veto a $440 billion defense spending bill if it contained the measure.
The House has not yet voted on that measure.
President George W. Bush has been dogged by questions over the Pentagon's and the CIA's treatment of terrorism suspects. Responding to questions on Monday in Panama, Bush said, "We do not torture," and defended his administration's efforts to stop Congress from imposing rules on prisoner treatment.
The administration also has been hit by the indictment of Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, on five counts of obstructing justice, perjury and lying in the two-year probe into the leak of covert CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity after her husband criticized the Iraq war.
(additional reporting by Joanne Kenen, Susan Cornwell, Thomas Ferraro and Caren Bohan)
Copyright © 2005 Reuters Limited. All rights reserved. Republication or redistribution of Reuters content is expressly prohibited without the prior written consent of Reuters. Reuters shall not be liable for any errors or delays in the content, or for any actions taken in reliance thereon.
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