Guantánamo detainees drugged and then interrogated

it's not like this is so damn surprising given what we already know about what's gone on in gitmo but what we only suspect vs. what is revealed as fact is a big difference...


jeffrey kaye and jason leopold posting at truthout...

Detainees in custody of the US military were interrogated while drugged with powerful antipsychotic and other medications that "could impair an individual's ability to provide accurate information," according to a declassified Department of Defense (DoD) inspector general's report that probed the alleged use of "mind altering drugs" during interrogations.

In addition, detainees were subjected to "chemical restraints," hydrated with intravenous (IV) fluids while they were being interrogated and, in what appears to be a form of psychological manipulation, the inspector general's probe confirmed at least one detainee - convicted "dirty bomb" plotter Jose Padilla - was the subject of a "deliberate ruse" in which his interrogator led him to believe he was given an injection of "truth serum."

Truthout obtained a copy of the report - "Investigation of Allegations of the Use of Mind-Altering Drugs to Facilitate Interrogations of Detainees" - prepared by the DoD's deputy inspector general for intelligence in September 2009, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request we filed nearly two years ago.

[Leonard Rubenstein, a medical ethicist at Johns Hopkins Center for Public Health and Human Rights and the former president of Physicians for Human Rights] said the failure to inform prisoners what drugs they were given means "some basic principles of medical ethics were cast aside, especially those requiring a doctor to explain his or her recommendation and seek consent for it as an affirmation of the dignity and autonomy of the patient."

"Even where consent is not forthcoming and involuntary medication is allowed after voluntary medication is not accepted, it should never take place unless this process is followed," Rubenstein said.

The cumulative effects of indefinite detention, interrogations, use of drugs, and other conditions of confinement also appear to have taken a toll on the detainees' mental state and impacted the DoD watchdog's ability to conduct a thorough investigation.

Indeed, when the inspector general sought to interview the attorney representing one detainee who claimed he was given mind-altering drugs during interrogations, the attorney responded, "at this state of his incarceration, [redacted] memory is severely compromised and, unfortunately, we are skeptical that he can provide you with any further details ..."

The investigation also found instances where "chemical restraints" were used on detainees "that posed a threat to themselves or others," which Rubenstein said, "is contrary to US Bureau of Prison regulations, decisions of the US Supreme Court and to medical ethics principles that forbid subordinating the patient's medical interests to prison security."

[...]

The inspector general's yearlong probe was launched in June 2008, two months after the publication of a Washington Post report in which some detainees claimed they were forcibly drugged and coerced into making confessions.

One of the detainees at the center of The Washington Post report, Adel al-Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman who was imprisoned at Guantanamo from 2002 to 2005, is prominently featured in the inspector general's report and identified as "IG-02."

According to his attorney's notes cited in The Washington Post, al-Nusairi claimed he was injected with an unknown medication that made him extremely sleepy just before he was interrogated in 2002. When his captors awakened him, he fabricated a confession for US interrogators in hopes they would leave him alone so he could sleep.

"I was completely gone," al-Nusairi told his attorney, Anant Raut. "I said, 'Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I'm a member of al-Qaeda, I will.'"

and you can be sure, if it happened at guantánamo, it also took place at bagram and all the other black sites...

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More on Afghanistan: Bagram, worse than Guantánamo but further away and, thus, less visible

i've posted on bagram many times... one of these days, the shit will hit the fan over bagram and it can't come too soon... when i'm in kabul, i shudder every time i think of what's going on there, just 80km up the road...

from john hanrahan at nieman watchdog...

The system of dealing with Bagram prisoners through detainee review boards (DRB), although improved upon since President Obama took office, violates universal standards on detention in that it “does not provide detainees the minimum level of due process required by international law,” according to a human rights organization’s recent report. Thus far, the report, issued May 10 by New York- and Washington, D.C.-based non-profit organization Human Rights First (HRF), has been ignored by almost all the mainstream print and broadcast news media.

As Human Rights First states, the ever-growing number of Bagram detainees – most of whom are Afghans – have far fewer rights than their counterparts at the much more controversial Guantanamo Bay prison. Thanks to a 2008 Supreme Court decision, Guantanamo detainees “have the right to challenge their detention in a U.S. court and to representation by a lawyer,” something Bagram prisoners are denied, the report notes.

The system has resulted in detainees being incarcerated at Bagram for eight years or more, “based largely on evidence they have never seen and with no meaningful opportunity to defend themselves,” the report says. Additionally “a significant number” of the approximately 41 non-Afghan detainees “have been recommended for release by a Detainee Review Board but remain in detention at...[Bagram]..without explanation.”

In an interview with Nieman Watchdog, the HRF report’s author, Daphne Eviatar, put that figure of 1,700 detainees into context, noting that it is “almost triple the number of detainees who were at Bagram when President Obama came into office two years ago, and is 10 times greater than the number of prisoners currently being held at Guantanamo.” In addition, it is more than twice the total number of detainees – 779 – who were ever held at Guantanamo. More than 1,300 individuals were arrested and incarcerated in Bagram in 2010 alone, compared to some 500 in 2009. Eviatar is senior associate in Human Rights First’s law and security program. (Click here for a video on Bagram by Eviatar.)

Besides violating international law, the current system “flies in the face of the well-founded wisdom of our top military leaders in the region who havehttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif warned repeatedly of the dangers of denying Afghan detainees due process,” Eviatar said in releasing the report. “Beyond the imprisonment of many likely innocent people, the lack of due process erodes support for U.S. forces in Afghanistan and ultimately undermines U.S. goals there.”

There have been past indications that a majority of the Bagram detainees are being wrongfully held. In August 2009, various news outlets reported that U.S. Marine Corps Reserve Major General Douglas M. Stone had been assigned to investigate detention practices in Afghanistan and had issued a still-unreleased 700-page classified report. As National Public Radio reported at the time, Stone told senior military officials that as many as 400 of the 600 detainees then held at Bagram could be released.

as in the previous post, imagine if you will what it would be like for any of us to have innocent family members killed or "disappeared" at the hands of a foreign power and not being able to do a damn thing about it...

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The American hikers detained in Iran - a "no-context" triumph for an NYT op-ed

ya gotta love our so-called news media... they never hesitate to step forward with stories and opinions unequivocally stating facts and taking strong positions... yes, they want to appear like they're doing their job and, to all appearances, they are... what isn't apparent, principally because it's almost never there, is the context so vitally necessary to truly understanding anything presented as "news" or "opinion"...

take today's nyt op-ed, calling on iran to follow its own rule of law and to release the three detained american hikers apprehended while hiking along the iran-iraq border (see my previous post here)... now that the hikers have finally been charged, after a year in confinement, with "illegal border crossing," the piece very reasonably lays out a strong argument that iran should observe its own law, a law which states that such an offense is punishable with a fine but not jail time... the piece goes on to lament that iran seems to be treating the three as pawns in its ceaseless game of taunting the united states...

never once in the piece nor in any other mainstream news media reports i've read on the detainees is the broader context mentioned, context that would point out that unlawful detention, detention without charges, and detention under potentially damaging physical and emotional conditions is precisely what the united states itself has been doing and continues to do, all under the justification of our superior moral authority: u.s. = good; iran = bad...

perhaps an even bigger piece of unmentioned context is how united states behavior is mirrored, emulated and even aspired to by other countries... the united states is always pushing its status as a role model in the world of nations and, while there are some who would snicker at such a boast (and i'm frequently one of them), the truth is that the united states does indeed set the bar for nation-state behavior in the foreign policy arena and, to a lesser extent, the internal domestic policy arena as well... i've heard officials of other countries, first-hand and in so many words, say, "well, what's the problem...? YOU do it, why shouldn't we...?"

lack of context in news and opinion reporting, reporting we should be able to rely on as not only factual but textured, complete and fully informative, is a very slippery slope... we need look no further than andrew breitbart's recent deliberate omission of a key part of shirley sherrod's speech to see just how dangerous and manipulative the absence of full context can be, but what we fail to realize is that the breitbart scam is only the tip of a very large iceberg...

why are we given so little context...? i don't think anyone with half a brain could miss the answer to that one... if we did have the full context or even half of it, we might arrive at very different conclusions about the meaning and implication of news events than we do currently... people are not stupid and, in fact, far from it... we are fully capable of rational thought and forming our own conclusions based on information and evidence at hand... when deprived of that information and evidence, we will form conclusions based on the information and evidence we're given... and that, my friends, is the whole idea...

Since their detention, the Americans have been denied access to their lawyer and allowed only one telephone call to their families and one visit from their mothers. There is particular worry now about Ms. Shourd, who spends 23 hours a day in solitary confinement — the reason is unclear — and has a precancerous condition on her cervix and a breast abnormality, both of which require monitoring. The Iranians are withholding results of her medical tests.

It’s hard not to compare the hikers’ experience with that of Shahram Amiri, the Iranian nuclear scientist who recently returned to Tehran. He claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency had abducted him in Saudi Arabia. American officials said he was an informant who defected and then got cold feet.

Given the shady world of espionage, we may never know the truth. What we do know is that he was allowed to leave this country and was last seen embracing his family in Tehran. It’s long past time for the three Americans to have the same opportunity.

what about the host of detainees the united states has kept sequestered in places like bagram and guantánamo for years without charges and without any family visits at all...? don't they deserve the same opportunity...? don't they deserve the same empathetic treatment from the nyt...? isn't it important that we see the similarities between the our treatment of detainees and that of iran...?

yes, the circumstances of the hikers and the detainees in guantánamo are different but what isn't different is that we're dealing with real, live human beings... you can't call for decent treatment and following the rule of law for one set of human beings and not recognize that all human beings deserve that same treatment... yet it is the position of organs like the nyt, faithfully mirroring the position of our government, that OUR detainees are somehow in a lesser category, somewhere between wild animal and human... and yet we can still ask with perfectly straight faces, "why do 'they' hate us?"...

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Back in Amerika

yeah, it was only two weeks... two months outside the u.s. is more my average but, given where i was traveling amid the beauty, the magic and the timeless and tangible antiquity of the outer hebrides, coming back to the same sad state of affairs is particularly disheartening...

glenn greenwald, as per usual, zeroes in on the amazing and, no surprise, virtually ignored depth of obama's deceit...

Few issues highlight Barack Obama's extreme hypocrisy the way that Bagram does. As everyone knows, one of George Bush’s most extreme policies was abducting people from all over the world -- far away from any battlefield -- and then detaining them at Guantanamo with no legal rights of any kind, not even the most minimal right to a habeas review in a federal court. Back in the day, this was called "Bush's legal black hole." In 2006, Congress codified that policy by enacting the Military Commissions Act, but in 2008, the Supreme Court, in Boumediene v. Bush, ruled that provision unconstitutional, holding that the Constitution grants habeas corpus rights even to foreign nationals held at Guantanamo. Since then, detainees have won 35 out of 48 habeas hearings brought pursuant to Boumediene, on the ground that there was insufficient evidence to justify their detention.

Immediately following Boumediene, the Bush administration argued that the decision was inapplicable to detainees at Bagram -- including even those detained outside of Afghanistan but then flown to Afghanistan to be imprisoned. Amazingly, the Bush DOJ -- in a lawsuit brought by Bagram detainees seeking habeas review of their detention -- contended that if they abduct someone and ship them to Guantanamo, then that person (under Boumediene) has the right to a habeas hearing, but if they instead ship them to Bagram, then the detainee has no rights of any kind. In other words, the detainee's Constitutional rights depends on where the Government decides to drop them off to be encaged. One of the first acts undertaken by the Obama DOJ that actually shocked civil libertarians was when, last February, as The New York Times put it, Obama lawyers "told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team."

But last April, John Bates, the Bush-43-appointed, right-wing judge overseeing the case, rejected the Bush/Obama position and held that Boumediene applies to detainees picked up outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram. I reviewed that ruling here, in which Judge Bates explained that the Bagram detainees are "virtually identical to the detainees in Boumediene," and that the Constitutional issue was exactly the same: namely, "the concern that the President could move detainees physically beyond the reach of the Constitution and detain them indefinitely."

But the Obama administration was undeterred by this loss. They quickly appealed Judge Bates' ruling. As the NYT put it about that appeal: "The decision signaled that the administration was not backing down in its effort to maintain the power to imprison terrorism suspects for extended periods without judicial oversight." Today, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals adopted the Bush/Obama position, holding that even detainees abducted outside of Afghanistan and then shipped to Bagram have no right to contest the legitimacy of their detention in a U.S. federal court, because Boumediene does not apply to prisons located within war zones (such as Afghanistan).

So congratulations to the United States and Barack Obama for winning the power to abduct people anywhere in the world and then imprison them for as long as they want with no judicial review of any kind.

with my work in kabul, i've spent no small amount of time contemplating what was taking place less than 100km from where i sat at my desk, trying to make a constructive difference in the midst of utter tragedy...

despite the many positive changes this president has made, there is no way i can find it in my heart to support an administration that consciously and deliberately tramples on the most fundamental principles my country supposedly stands for... as long as the united states continues to say one thing and do another, particularly when it is as egregious as this, we expose ourselves to the revenge of those who are being crushed under the heels of our boots...

or is that the plan...?

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Bagram, Afghanistan

i've posted extensively on bagram, otherwise known as "guantánamo east" (see here)... i have been aware that they've been constructing a "bigger, better" bagram but it's evidently now "open to the public"...

as usual, al jazeera has the scoop, not to be seen in u.s. media...

Journalists have been allowed to inspect refurbished facilities at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan, the largest US military hub in the region and home to a controversial prison.

Al Jazeera's correspondent James Bays, who was among those who inspected the facilities on Sunday, said Bagram, unlike its Guantánamo counterpart, was clearly not going to be shut down soon.

"The new prison wing cost some $60 million to build ... and is meant to be part of a new era of openness and transparency," Bays said.

keep in mind that, besides housing the detention facility, bagram is also a HUGE u.s. military base, "home" to over 24,000 military and contractors...

Bagram Air Field is the largest US military hub in Afghanistan and is home to about 24,000 military personnel and civilian contractors.

Tens of millions of dollars continue to be spent on expanding and upgrading facilities - turning Bagram into a town spread over about 5,000 acres.

The air field part of the complex is already handling 400 tonnes of cargo and 1,000 passengers daily, according to Air Force spokesman Captain David Faggard.

and new facilities evidently don't mean better treatment (why are we not surprised?)...

Omar Dighayes, a former detainee at Bagram and Guantánamo Bay, said the Bagram prison resembled a concentration camp.

"People were beaten, dragged, tortured in it. There were high places where guards stood with guns. It was a hard, difficult place," he told Al Jazeera.

But he said he doubts the newly refurbished Bagram prison will improve conditions for its detainees, one of which includes his brother-in-law, whom Dighayes says was recently "badly beaten" inside Bagram.

"I don't think it's the facilities which make the difference, it's the treatment of people inside.

"Everybody who worked in Bagram - from the American side - will tell you that the things I'm describing did happen. People from the military intelligence [and] people from the FBI have spoken about the barbaric treatment at this facility."

here's al jazeera's riz khan on the "new" detention center...

Part 1



Part 2



here's an al jazeera clip on the "tour" of the new facility given to journalists...

Barack Obama, the US president, has pledged to close down Guantanamo Bay, the military prison in Cuba.

But in Afghanistan, hundreds of people are still detained without charge at a "secret" prison in Bagram airbase, the largest US military hub in the region.

The US authorities recently permitted journalists to see the updated and expanded facility, which cost nearly $60m.

change we can believe in...

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Democracy in Afghanistan...? Not so much... The Afghan Guantánamo...? You betcha... Interrogation techniques hazardous to your health...? Yes...

mr. khan would like peace, security and job opportunities... pardon me, but, no shit... while we're at it, how about some decent infrastructure like roads, electricity, water, health care, and schools... oh, yeah, and then there's decent food supplies that aren't so outrageously expensive that the folks starving to death on the streets might have a shot at basic nutrition...

Mubaruz Khan didn't bother to vote when Afghans went to the polls in the country's second-ever democratic election last month. He was too busy eking out a living selling cigarettes and soda for $3 a day, and didn't think voting would make a difference in his life.

Millions like Khan stayed home on Aug. 20, a sharp contrast to 2004, when Afghans jammed polling stations to give President Hamid Karzai his first term. Ominous warnings from the Taliban suppressed turnout, but some Afghans said they were also discouraged by the government's failure to halt endemic corruption, spiraling unemployment and crumbling security.

"We want peace. We want security. We want job opportunities," the 55-year-old Khan said Monday. "Otherwise, the democracy and the elections that they are all shouting about every day mean nothing to us."

meanwhile, just a few kilometers down the road from where i sit typing this lies bagram, the afghan guantánamo...

Bagram is "the forgotten second Guantánamo," says American military law expert Eugene Fidell, a professor at Yale Law School. "But apparently there is a continuing need for this sort of place even under the Obama administration."

From the beginning, "Bagram was worse than Guantanamo," says New York-based attorney Tina Foster, who has argued several cases on behalf of detainee rights in US courts. "Bagram has always been a torture chamber."

And what does Obama say? Nothing. He never so much as mentions Bagram in any of his speeches. When discussing America's mistreatment of detainees, he only refers to Guantanamo.

and bagram ain't small, either...

The Bagram detention facility, by now the largest American military prison outside the United States, is not marked on any maps. In fact, its precise location, somewhere on the periphery of the giant air base northeast of the Afghan capital, is classified. It comprises two sand-colored buildings that resemble airplane hangars, surrounded by tall concrete walls and green camouflage tarps. The facility was set up in 2002 as a temporary prison on the grounds of a former Soviet air base.

Today, the two buildings contain large cages, each with the capacity to hold 25 to 30 prisoners. Up to 1,000 detainees can be held at Bagram at any one time. The detainees sleep on mats, and there is one toilet behind a white curtain for each cage. A $60 million extension is expected to be completed by the end of the year.

i've never been up the road toward bagram... in fact, i've barely been out of kabul... however, if i ever do get the opportunity to see some more of this amazingly rugged country, bagram won't be anywhere near the top of my list of "must-see" places...

and as long as we're on the subject of detainees, it kind of leads into how they're treated, particularly in the interrogation process... apparently, our methods aren't necessarily contributing to mental and emotional health...

Prolonged stress from the CIA's harsh interrogations could have impaired the memories of terrorist suspects, diminishing their ability to recall and provide the detailed information the spy agency sought, according to a scientific paper published Monday.

The methods could even have caused the suspects to create – and believe – false memories, contends the paper, which scrutinizes the techniques used by the CIA under the Bush administration through the lens of neurobiology. It suggests the methods are actually counterproductive, no matter how much suspects might eventually say.

"Solid scientific evidence on how repeated and extreme stress and pain affect memory and executive functions (such as planning or forming intentions) suggests these techniques are unlikely to do anything other than the opposite of that intended by coercive or enhanced interrogation," according to the paper in the scientific journal Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

[...]

"We've known for quite a while that stress radically impairs cognition. We know memory is very fragile to begin with," said Stephen Soldz, president-elect of Psychologists for Social Responsibility and a professor at Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. "It's just amazing that this has not been taken into account."

not so amazing... in fact, my guess is that it actually WAS taken into account and deliberately discounted because it didn't line up with the preconceived notions of those who were bound and determined that torture and useful interrogation somehow went together despite all of the principles upon which the foundation of the united states supposedly rests...

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I just got off the plane here in Kabul and was greeted by this news about the Bagram detainees

and this IS good news... while it ain't perfect, it's a start and a whole hell of a lot better than heading the other direction like we were under you-know-who...

Hundreds of prisoners held by the U.S. military in Afghanistan will for the first time have the right to challenge their indefinite detention and call witnesses in their defense under a new review system being put in place this week, according to administration officials.

The new system will be applied to the more than 600 Afghans held at the Bagram military base, and will mark the first substantive change in the overseas detention policies that President Obama inherited from the Bush administration.

[...]

Under the new rules, each detainee will be assigned a U.S. military official, not a lawyer, to represent his interests and examine evidence against him. In proceedings before a board composed of military officers, detainees will have the right to call witnesses and present evidence when it is "reasonably available," the official said. The boards will determine whether detainees should be held by the United States, turned over to Afghan authorities or released. For those ordered held longer, the process will be repeated at six-month intervals.

my preference would be that each detainee have a lawyer, even if it's a military lawyer, but let's see what happens...

by the way, the sign that greeted me the first time i landed here in march of last year is still there...

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Bagram detainees protest indefinite imprisonment

i'll probably be heading back to afghanistan in september where i'll be parked in kabul roughly 60 km from bagram...

The prisoners at the largest U.S. detention facility in Afghanistan have refused to leave their cells for at least the past two weeks to protest their indefinite imprisonment, according to lawyers and the families of detainees.

The prison-wide protest, which has been going on since at least July 1, offers a rare glimpse inside a facility that is even more closed off to the public than the U.S. detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Information about the protest came to light when the International Committee of the Red Cross informed the families of several detainees that scheduled video teleconferences and family visits were being canceled.

Representatives of the ICRC, which monitors the treatment of detainees and arranges the calls, last visited the Bagram prison on July 5, but inmates were unwilling to meet with them.

"We have suspended our video telephone conference and family visit programs because the detainees have informed us they do not wish to participate in the programs for the time being," said Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the organization.

Although the prisoners are refusing to leave their cells to shower or exercise, they are not engaging in hunger strikes or violence. Ramzi Kassem, an attorney for Yemeni national Amin al-Bakri, said detainees are protesting being held indefinitely without trial or legal recourse.

i have only three words in response to this - obama, obama, obama... he ain't doing anything about it and, if the track record of his administration so far is any guide, he ain't GOING to be doing anything about it, in fact, he may move to make it worse...

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Detainee abuse at Bagram

like we didn't know what was happening at "guantánamo east"...

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Oh, yay... Learned helplessness...

a societal and organizational dynamic that i've observed for many years is what i have come to call "learned helplessness"... many of us develop that mindset when, over many, many years, we've come to believe that no matter what we do, our employer won't change a damn thing, our society will still be off the rails, and our government will still feel perfectly within its rights to do whatever it goddam well pleases no matter what we, the people, think about it...

now, i come to find out that very same dynamic, using the very same name underpins the oh-so-euphemistically labeled "enhanced interrogation techniques," known to you and me as torture, methods have been - and probably still are - so liberally applied at our < snark > club med-style < /snark > "detention" facilities, known to you and me as prisons and to our friends in russia as gulags...

well, at least panetta isn't sitting on his hands...

CIA Director Leon Panetta fired Mitchell, Jessen & Associates and all other contractors that aided the CIA in its interrogations of alleged terrorists, the New Yorker reported this weekend.

The firings took place in April, around the same time the Senate Armed Services Committee reported on the role played by James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen in developing "countermeasures to defeat" the resistance of captured enemy detainees from whom intelligence was being sought.

Mitchell and Jessen, who run the firm, had worked on a Pentagon program that taught U.S. service members how to survive harsh enemy interrogation methods. They relied on elements of that training in proposing an interrogation program for the CIA. It included methods such as sleep deprivation and other actions based on "theories of 'learned helplessness,' " the New Yorker reported.

our minders have worked long and hard to instill in us the learned helplessness mindset... we're ever so much easier to control when we feel and think that way... nothing to see here, folks... just move along...

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On Memorial Day, listen to Abdul Salaam Zaeef speak about Bagram and Guantánamo

a friend of mine in afghanistan, the country director for the institute for war and peace reporting, jean mackenzie, interviewed mullah abdul salaam zaeef in kabul earlier this year in her additional capacity as a reporter for the global post... i had posted on it back in march here... now i see that cnn picked up on his story...

As one of the right-hand men to Taliban leader Mullah Omar, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef was one of the first Taliban leaders arrested when the United States began military operations in Afghanistan.
Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was Afghanistan's ambassador to Pakistan, says U.S. war efforts are "failing."

Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who was Afghanistan's ambassador to Pakistan, says U.S. war efforts are "failing."

As a detainee, he was held both at Afghanistan's Bagram Air Base and at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba -- spending more than three years in Guantanamo before he was released in 2006.

[...]

"I didn't see a worse situation in my life than Bagram," recalled Zaeef. "They were beating me, they put me in the snow, in the cold, until I was unconscious."

[...]

In Guantanamo, Zaeef recalled, "there was no rule, no regulation for [treatment of] the detainees."

[...]

"Anyone in the world, to be deprived of any kind of human rights, any kind of justice -- he becomes angry, so he will try to get revenge," he said. While detained, he said, detainees sometimes lose everything -- homes, property, money -- and "they have nothing after that."
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While he claims to no longer be a Taliban member, he said he supports the insurgents and believes the United States will never be victorious in Afghanistan. "There is no choice" for the Taliban except to fight, he said. "There is no other way for them."

i'm glad to see his story getting some attention from the traditional media... people need to know the ugliness that's going on in our names, particularly as we observe our memorial day...

watch...

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Bruce Fein: "The Bagram procedures are descendants of the Spanish Inquisition"

more on guantánamo east bagram and "change we can believe in"...

bruce fein, writing in slate via information clearing house...

President Obama ratified the following charade to make "enemy combatant" determinations at Bagram, which can be the equivalent of life sentences. The initial judgment is made "in the field." It is reviewed within 75 days, and then at six-month intervals. The reviewing body is the Unlawful Enemy Combatant Review Board, a panel of three commissioned officers. It examines "all relevant information reasonably available." The detainee is denied access to a personal representative or lawyer. He is denied access to the government's evidence. He is denied an opportunity to respond in person. He is limited to submitting a written statement without knowledge of either his accusers or the allegations that must be rebutted. After its sham hearing, the UECRB makes a recommendation by majority vote to the commanding general as to whether the detainee is an "enemy combatant."

The Bagram procedures are descendants of the Spanish Inquisition. The executive branch decrees that "enemy combatant" status justifies detention, enforces the decree through executive detentions, and decides whether its enforcement decisions are correct. That combination was what the Founding Fathers decried as the "very definition of tyranny" in The Federalist 47. In addition, the incriminating evidence and accusers are secret. And the judges are military persons the detainee is accused of hoping to kill, which probably compromises their putative impartiality.

compromised...? ya THINK...?

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The Obama DOJ - contradictions blatant, transparent, and extreme

and incredibly scarey...

greenwald...

The Obama DOJ is now squarely to the Right of an extremely conservative, pro-executive-power, Bush 43-appointed judge on issues of executive power and due-process-less detentions. Leave aside for the moment the issue of whether you believe that the U.S. Government should have the right to abduct people anywhere in the world, ship them to faraway prisons and hold them there indefinitely without charges or any rights at all. The Bush DOJ -- and now the Obama DOJ -- maintain the President does and should have that right, and that's an issue that has been extensively debated. It was, after all, one of the centerpieces of the Bush regime of radicalism, lawlessness and extremism.

[...]

I'm not searching for ways to criticize Obama. I wish I could be writing paeans celebrating the restoration of the Constitution and the rule of law. But these actions -- these contradictions between what he said and what he is doing, the embrace of the very powers that caused so much anger towards Bush/Cheney -- are so blatant, so transparent, so extreme, that the only way to avoid noticing them is to purposely shut your eyes as tightly as possible and resolve that you don't want to see it, or that you're so convinced of his intrinsic Goodness that you'll just believe that even when it seems like he's doing bad things, he must really be doing them for the Good. If there was any unanimous progressive consensus over the last eight years, it was that the President does not have the power to kidnap people, ship them far away, and then imprison them indefinitely in a cage without due process. Has that progressive consensus changed as of January 20, 2009? I think we're going to find out.

it's very hard for me to square this with any hope i might have for a return to constitutional law, not when it's headed in the exact opposite direction...

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Speaking of Afghanistan, more on the Bagram detainees

when i see more and more of this kind of shit coming out, i have to ask myself, why the hell did i ever bother to vote for obama... why didn't i just sit it out... at least i wouldn't be feeling so damn betrayed...

here's more on what i posted on last week...

Obama Follows Bush Policy on Detainee Access to Courts

The Obama administration yesterday appealed a judge's decision granting three detainees at a U.S. military prison in Afghanistan the right to challenge their detention in U.S. courts, arguing partly that compliance would inhibit the future capture of Pakistani citizens for detention by U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

The appeal makes clear that, despite the ruling this month by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, the Obama administration for now wants to stick with a policy set by President George W. Bush that those incarcerated by U.S. troops in foreign prisons have no U.S. legal rights.

this sucks...

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Yee-Ha...! Some prisoners at Bagram will come under U.S. court jurisdiction

this is good news and long, long overdue... (btw, as i type this, i am sitting at my desk in kabul, approximately 60km south of bagram...)

A federal judge ruled on Thursday that prisoners in the war on terror can use U.S. civilian courts to challenge their detention at a military air base in Afghanistan.

U.S. District Judge John Bates turned down the United States' motion to deny the right to three foreign detainees at Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled last year that detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have the right to challenge their detention in court. But the government had argued that it did not apply to those in Afghanistan.

Bates said the cases were essentially the same and he quoted the Supreme Court ruling repeatedly in his judgment and applied the test created by it to each detainee. It is the first time a federal judge has applied the ruling to detainees in Afghanistan.

Bates considered the requests of four detainees asking to be released, but he reserved judgment on one detainee, Haji Wazir, because he is an Afghan citizen and releasing him could create "practical obstacles in the form of friction with the host country." He ordered Wazir and the government to file memos addressing those issues.

The other three detainees are from outside Afghanistan -- Fadi al Maqaleh of Yemen, Amin al Bakri of Yemen and Redha al-Najar of Tunisia.

All four of the detainees in this case were captured outside Afghanistan but have been held at the airfield for six years or more. Bates wrote that the determination to hold them as enemy combatants is part of a process even more inadequate at Bagram than it is at Guantanamo.

the detention center at bagram, mostly due to distance, has been much less in the public eye than guantánamo although, as the last line in the snippet above states, the process at bagram is "even more inadequate" than at guantánamo... all of these extra-legal hell-holes need to come under the careful eye of the u.s. justice system and it's about time it's happening...

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The U.S. prisons, prison ships and proxy prison sites - Guantánamo, Bagram, Diego Garcia, Camp Lemonier, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan and, yes, Abu Ghraib

monday, 19 may, democracy now...

Amy Goodman of Democracy Now interviewing Clive Stafford Smith, a British attorney who represents more than fifty of the prisoners at Guantanamo, legal director of the UK charity Reprieve and author of Eight O’Clock Ferry to the Windward Side: Seeking Justice in Guantanamo Bay. He is testifying on Tuesday before the House Committee on Foreign Relations about Guantanamo Bay.

[A]ccording to the most recent official figures, the United States is currently holding 27,000 secret prisoners around the world. So that means that 99 percent of these folk are not in Guantanamo Bay. Now they’re in other prisons elsewhere. And as you mentioned, Bagram has 680. But there’s a huge number of people being held in Iraq, and one of the intriguing aspects of this that doesn’t get much reporting is that the US is bringing people into Iraq from elsewhere to hold them there, simply because that keeps rather annoying people like you, Amy—I mean the media—and also annoying people like me, lawyers, away from the prisoners so they can’t get any sort of legal rights.

And when you look around the world, there’s a huge camp, Camp Lemonier in Djibouti, where a lot of people are being held. Diego Garcia, contrary to the past analysis of the British government, in the Indian Ocean has been used, in my belief, to hold people. And we’ve identified thirty-two prison ships, sort of prison hulks you used to read about in Victorian England, which have been converted to hold prisoners, and we’ve got pictures of them in Lisbon Harbor, for example. And these are holding prisoners around the world, as well. And there’s a bunch of proxy prisons—Morocco, Egypt and Jordan—where this stuff is going on. And this is a huge concern, because the world focus is on Guantanamo Bay, which really is a diversionary tactic in the whole war of terror or war on terror, whatever you’d like to call it. And actually, most of these people who have been severed from their legal rights are in these other secret prisons around the world.

it's becoming increasingly apparent that guantánamo is a diversionary tactic... i speculated the other day that the announcement of the new prison to be built at bagram in afghanistan is a signal that guantánamo will indeed be closed... this will precipitate a victory chant from human rights activists who will fail to note that all of these other sites are still out there, just much less visible and a whole lot easier to shield from prying eyes...

AMY GOODMAN: Very quickly, Clive, did you say that you—that the US is taking prisoners to Iraq?

CLIVE STAFFORD SMITH: Oh, yes, they are. I mean, the US is taking an estimated forty to sixty, on average, prisoners a day around the world. And it doesn’t take a lot of arithmetic to tell you how many people that is each month. And people are being taken to Iraq to be held in Abu Ghraib, even today, and also in other camps in Iraq.

mark my words... we will see guantánamo closed about the time the new facility at bagram opens...

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Oh, swell... A bigger, better Bagram (or, should I say, Guantánamo)...

if you're looking for any clues about whether or not guantánamo will be closed, look no further...

The Pentagon is moving forward with plans to build a new, 40-acre detention complex on the main American military base in Afghanistan, officials said, in a stark acknowledgment that the United States is likely to continue to hold prisoners overseas for years to come.

The proposed detention center would replace the cavernous, makeshift American prison on the Bagram military base north of Kabul, which is now typically packed with about 630 prisoners, compared with the 270 held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Until now, the Bush administration had signaled that it intended to scale back American involvement in detention operations in Afghanistan. It had planned to transfer a large majority of the prisoners to Afghan custody, in an American-financed, high-security prison outside Kabul to be guarded by Afghan soldiers.

it's a heckuva deal... close guantánamo and everybody'll think, hey...! we scored a BIG victory...! we got the government to close guantánamo... WOO-HOO...! meanwhile, on the other side of the world, far away from prying eyes, out of sight, out of mind, with layers of security too thick to penetrate, out in the middle of absolutely no-fucking-where, the u.s. will now be the proud proprietor of a super-sized guantánamo...

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Seems like we've heard rumors about closing Guantánamo before

what i'd like to know is what about bagram (see below) and the other cia black sites...?

The Bush administration could announce plans by the end of its term in January to close Guantánamo prison and an upcoming Supreme Court ruling might be the impetus for this, senior U.S. officials and experts say.

The government is under international and domestic pressure to close the prison, which opened at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay on Cuba in January 2002 to house terrorism suspects caught after the invasion of Afghanistan.

"A decision could be made in this administration to announce the closure of Guantanamo. It is unlikely in the next nine months that Guantánamo could be physically (closed) but it is possible the policy decision could be taken to close it," said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition he was not identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Officials say planning and debate has intensified in recent months over how to deal with Guantánamo, which President George W. Bush acknowledges has tarnished America's image and human rights advocates say has damaged U.S credibility. prison and an upcoming Supreme Court ruling might be the impetus for this, senior U.S. officials and experts say.

The government is under international and domestic pressure to close the prison, which opened at the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo Bay on Cuba in January 2002 to house terrorism suspects caught after the invasion of Afghanistan.

"A decision could be made in this administration to announce the closure of Guantánamo. It is unlikely in the next nine months that Guantánamo could be physically (closed) but it is possible the policy decision could be taken to close it," said a senior U.S. official, who spoke on condition he was not identified because of the sensitivity of the issue.

Officials say planning and debate has intensified in recent months over how to deal with Guantánamo, which President George W. Bush acknowledges has tarnished America's image and human rights advocates say has damaged U.S credibility.

This photo is said to be the first to be distributed taken from within the Bagram facility. Conditions at Bagram have been reported to have been far more brutal, and primitive, than those at the more well-known Guantánamo Bay detention camp.

first of all, i don't believe for one second that the bush administration intends to close guantánamo... this rumor has surfaced repeatedly and has repeatedly been squashed... besides, even if guantánamo is closed, that doesn't take care of bagram and those other sites where the united states violates the geneva and the u.n. convention against torture... closing guantánamo would only be symbolic and wouldn't at all get to the heart of the matter...

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We WILL be inured to torture as U.S. policy IF we don't stand up and fight

two-time pulitzer winner, anthony lewis, a true "dean" of journalism in a way his fellow jewish journalist, robert novak, will never be, offers his views on the horror of torture as official u.s. policy...

In these last weeks of turbulent events, the single most significant has not been the financial crisis, not the fall of a governor, not the passing of the fifth year of the war without end in Iraq. It has been an American president's formal blessing of the use of torture.

That was what President Bush did in early March when he vetoed legislation prohibiting the use of brutal methods of interrogation by American intelligence agents. His action was quickly overtaken by other news. But in its redefinition of American values — of the American character — it had profound implications.

[...]

The corrupting effects of the adoption of torture as an American practice have been widespread. First of all, on the law. The Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, which makes binding interpretations of the law for the federal government, issued secret opinions defining torture away to the vanishing point, saying it must be equivalent in pain to "organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death" — and adding that Congress could not stop the president from ordering the use of torture. (The whole idea of secret official opinions defining the law should be anathema in a free republic, one that has boasted from the beginning of having a government of laws, not men. Secret laws are the hallmark of tyrannies.)

The Justice Department opinions were not abstractions. They were immediately taken up by political appointees at the Pentagon and led directly to the torture of dozens of prisoners and the killing of some at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan.

Torture has had corrupting effects on our politics, too. Most Republicans in Congress have defended President Bush's claim of the right to use such methods, evidently as a matter of political solidarity. The corruption has even touched the man who more than anyone has been a symbol of resistance to torture, John McCain. Senator McCain led Congress in 2005 to pass the legislation reiterating the ban on the military's use of torture. But when it came to extending the ban to intelligence agents in this year's Intelligence Authorization Act, he sided with the president. It was as if he were saying that the North Vietnamese who so cruelly tortured him as a prisoner were war criminals if they were soldiers — but not if they were intelligence agents.

[...]

[T]he rest of us do not have to resign ourselves to being a Torture Nation. ... Col. Lawrence B. Wilkerson, U.S. Army (Ret.), who was chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, wrote: "We must start now to recognize our crimes and our complicity. We are all guilty, and we must all take action in whatever way we can. Torture and abuse are not American. They are foreign to us and always should be. We need to exorcise them from our souls and make amends."

there is only one surefire way to restore our country's integrity, and that's to insure that the criminals responsible are prosecuted for war crimes in the hague, in full view of the watching world...

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Oh, crap...! Here we go again...! The U.S. holds another German citizen in Bagram without any solid evidence...

oferchrissake... don't we EVER learn (see khalid al masri and murat kurnaz)...? if i was a german high government official, i would be VERY PISSED...!

here's the lead-in...


A German soldier on patrol
near Bagram in Afghanistan

For the past three months, the United States military has detained a German citizen in Afghanistan on suspicion of terrorism. German security experts are convinced that the man, who has a history of psychological problems, is innocent.

[...]

An employee of the [ICRC] visited Gholam Ghaus Z., a German citizen, at the US air base in Bagram near Kabul, where he has been held under inhumane conditions since early January. The Americans believe that the 41-year-old man is a terrorist.

[...]

Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, has carefully investigated the man, who is from Afghanistan but holds a German passport and lives in the western German city of Wuppertal. They have also investigated the unmarried man's family members and acquaintances, but have not found any evidence of extremist activities or dubious contacts with Islamists.

now, here's the REAL low-down...

Gholam Z. claims that he traveled to the Afghan capital Kabul to visit members of his widely scattered family in early January. While he was there, he heard that Western-quality goods could be obtained in a supermarket on the grounds of a US military base in Kabul, and that he, as a German citizen, could go shopping there without any problems.

Gholam Z. borrowed a relative's car to go on what a security expert has called his "fatal shopping trip," during which he planned to buy a razor, among other items. According to his version of events, he drove up to the military base on Jan. 4, showed the guard his German passport in its red cover and was then allowed to pass through several security checkpoints without incident.

But then US soldiers must have suddenly noticed Gholam Z., and he was detained. To the soldiers, it looked like a terrorist had managed to enter the well-guarded camp by posing as part of a group of visitors. It was the sort of suspicion that would automatically put guards on edge, as the number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan had increased substantially during the year 2007.

The Americans searched Gholam Z.'s clothing and found cash in various currencies, with a total value of about €1,000 ($1,580), as well as telephone cards from several countries. For the US military, these items were strong evidence that they were dealing with an Islamist terrorist who was part of an international network.

Gholam Z. was also carrying a brochure for London's Tower Bridge, fueling suspicions that the landmark could be the target of an attack.

US military interrogators spent hours trying to extract information from the presumed terrorist. They refused to believe his attempts at an explanation. He had not planned an attack on Tower Bridge, he told them, but had merely visited relatives in London and gone on a sightseeing trip that included the landmark. But the man's story seemed confused to the interrogators.

The US military interrogators also considered the suspect's justification for the foreign currency he was carrying to be implausible. He told them that he had stopped in Iran on the way to Afghanistan, where he had sold a large number of used mobile phones from Germany.

The soldiers locked him up and continued to interrogate him, but without yielding any results. They also refused to allow the German to contact a lawyer.

[...]

But totally clean apparently isn't clean enough for the US military in Afghanistan, which is under permanent threat of attack. The Americans dealt with the man from Wuppertal in the same way they had proceeded in other cases where innocent people had come under suspicion -- they kept Gholam Z. locked up.

lock 'em up and throw away the key and who cares about evidence, lawyers, speedy trials, or any other vestige of due process... it's the AMERICAN WAY...!

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