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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Information about the CIA black sites continues to trickle in

i've posted extensively on the cia black sites, particularly the ones in poland, lithuania and diego garcia... here's some fresh information on the site in romania, dug up, no surprise, by a non-u.s. news organization, in this case, the german network ard...

The existence of a CIA prison in Romania has been widely reported, but its location has never been made public. The Associated Press and German public television ARD located the former prison and learned details of the facility where harsh interrogation tactics were used. ARD's program on the CIA prison is set to air Thursday.

The Romanian prison was part of a network of so-called black sites that the CIA operated and controlled overseas in Thailand, Lithuania and Poland. All the prisons were closed by May 2006, and the CIA's detention and interrogation program ended in 2009.

Unlike the CIA's facility in Lithuania's countryside or the one hidden in a Polish military installation, the CIA's prison in Romania was not in a remote location. It was hidden in plain sight, a couple blocks off a major boulevard on a street lined with trees and homes, along busy train tracks.

here it is, "hidden in plain sight"...


The National Registry Office for Classified Information, also known
as ORNISS, sits in a busy residential neighborhood minutes from
the center of Romania’s capital city of Bucharest in this recent photo.
Between 2003 and 2006, the CIA operated a secret prison from the
building's basement, bringing in high-value terror suspects for
interrogation and detention. A joint AP-ARD Panorama investigation
revealed the exact location of the prison. (AP Photo)

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Yes, it's more than "merely" torture, it's full-bore exploitation

a special report from truthout reveals the full extent of the CIA/DoD torture program...

retired air force capt. michael kearns was party to the hiring of dr. john bruce jessen, the psychologist who was under contract to the CIA and credited as being one of the architects of the government's top-secret torture program... kearns is interviewed in this truthout investigative report...

The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press.

jessen describes his techniques...

"From the moment you are detained (if some kind of exploitation is your Detainer's goal) everything your Detainer does will be contrived to bring about these factors: CONTROL, DEPENDENCY, COMPLIANCE AND COOPERATION," Jessen wrote. "Your detainer will work to take away your sense of control. This will be done mostly by removing external control (i.e., sleep, food, communication, personal routines etc. )…Your detainer wants you to feel 'EVERYTHING' is dependent on him, from the smallest detail, (food, sleep, human interaction), to your release or your very life … Your detainer wants you to comply with everything he wishes. He will attempt to make everything from personal comfort to your release unavoidably connected to compliance in your mind."

Jessen wrote that cooperation is the "end goal" of the detainer, who wants the detainee "to see that [the detainer] has 'total' control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.)."

Jessen described the kinds of pressures that would be exerted on the prisoner to achieve this goal, including "fear of the unknown, loss of control, dehumanization, isolation," and use of sensory deprivation and sensory "flooding." He also included "physical" deprivations in his list of detainer "pressures."

"Unlike everyday experiences, however, as a detainee we could be subjected to stressors/coercive pressures which we cannot completely control," he wrote. "If these stressors are manipulated and increased against us, the cumulative effect can push us out of the optimum range of functioning. This is what the detainer wants, to get us 'off balance.'"

"The Detainer wants us to experience a loss of composure in hopes we can be manipulated into some kind of collaboration..." Jessen wrote. "This is where you are most vulnerable to exploitation. This is where you are most likely to make mistakes, show emotions, act impulsively, become discouraged, etc. You are still close enough to being intact that you would appear convincing and your behavior would appear 'uncoerced.'"

kearns calls this horrific, tyrannical and wrong... how can we not agree...? it's enough to make me vomit as kearns said he did upon full realization of what took place here...

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Bullshit

ain't buyin' it...

Obama Defends Detention Conditions for Soldier Accused in WikiLeaks Case

President Obama has defended conditions in a Marine Corps jail for Pfc. Bradley E. Manning, who is accused of leaking classified government documents to WikiLeaks. The president said Friday that he had been assured that such measures as forcing Private Manning to sleep without clothing were justified and for his own safety.

Bradleymanning.Org/Handout/
European Pressphoto Agency

“With respect to Private Manning, I have actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures that have been taken in terms of his confinement are appropriate and are meeting our basic standards,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference. “They assure me that they are.”

“I can’t go into details about some of their concerns,” he added, “but some of this has to do with Private Manning’s safety as well.” He appeared to be referring to fears that Private Manning might harm himself, though the private, his friends and his lawyer have all denied that he is suicidal.

why doesn't obama motorcade his ass down to quantico and see for himself...?

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There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. Victory goes to the falsifiers.

dahlia lithwick on obama's eschewing of any accountability for our nation's criminal behavior...

President Barack Obama decided long ago that he would “turn the page” on prisoner abuse and other illegality connected to the Bush Administration’s war on terror. What he didn’t seem to understand, what he still seems not to appreciate, is that what was on that page would bleed through onto the next page and the page after that. There’s no getting past torture. There is only getting comfortable with it. The U.S. flirtation with torture is not locked in the past or in the black sites or prisons at which it occurred. Now more than ever, it’s feted on network television and held in reserve for the next president who persuades himself that it’s not illegal after all.

scott horton in harper's...

Since Barack Obama became president, the debate over torture in America has taken a morally corrupt turn. Defenders of the old regime continue to defend the use of torture as essential to the nation’s defense. Their claims are contradicted by the facts: torture was used to extract false confessions that fueled, among other things, the invasion of Iraq on false pretenses. The fact that America tortured is still a principal recruiting tool for radical Islamists. But Obama has kept silent in the face of all of this, not wishing to engage torture apologists in debate. More significantly, he has apparently encouraged his Justice Department to squelch any meaningful investigation of torture, in violation of the clear requirements of law. A policy that says “don’t look back” means the triumph of torture: while we may not be captives of our past, we are the captives of our perception of the past. When one side offers an airbrushed version of the past and the other is silent, then, in the binary world of Washington, victory goes to the falsifiers.

i've been posting about accountability - more specifically, the lack thereof - since i started this blog in 2005 (see google's 97 hits here) and we're still not seeing any...

(above courtesy of information clearing house...)

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Torture r us - waterboarding, hypothermia, heat injury, forced nakedness, forced sex acts, mock executions, descrating religious objects

there's something truly rotten at the core of my country when our elected representatives cannot bring themselves to condemn torture... absolutely disgusting...

As it debated legislation to reauthorize U.S. intelligence programs, the House Friday morning at the last minute stripped language from a wide-ranging amendment that would have prohibited U.S. intelligence operatives from engaging in cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

The torture prohibition had been included Thursday in a package of amendments offered by House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes (D-Texas) that was debated on the House floor. The section of the amendment was titled, “Cruel, Inhuman, and Degrading Treatment in Interrogations Prohibited.”

According to Politico, the language was drafted by liberal Washington Democratic Rep. Jim McDermott, and included in Reyes’ package of amendments at the insistence of Rules Committee Chairwoman Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) .

The torture language drew immediate criticism from key House Republicans and conservative opinion leaders off Capitol Hill. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), the ranking minority member of the Intelligence Committee, complained, “Republicans brought this to the attention of the American people, who were rightly outraged that Democrats would try to target those we ask to serve in harm’s way. … The annual intelligence bill should be about protecting and defending our nation, not targeting those we ask to do that deed and giving greater protections to terrorists.”

Before the House voted on the amendment, leaders decided that the provision should be removed, judging that its inclusion could put passage of the entire bill at risk. That required a hurriedly scheduled Rules Committee meeting Thursday evening to approve a rule that modified the Reyes amendment, to take out the torture provision. All of that delayed further action on the amendment, and the bill, until Friday.

When the House finally voted on the Reyes amendment Friday morning, it was on the modified version — sans the torture language, which would have specifically prohibited waterboarding, inducing hypothermia or heat injury, forcing a person to be naked or to perform a sex act, or conducting mock executions. The amendment also would have banned interrogators from forcing a prisoner to maintain stress positions or to desecrate a religious object.

reading things like this just make me want to cry...

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Another Friday night document dump, this one officially letting the legal justifiers of torture off the hook [UPDATE - Another Conyers p.r. stunt?]

accountability...? it's just a god-damned word on a piece of paper... we don't need any ste-e-e-eenkin' accountability...

Bush administration lawyers who wrote memos that paved the way for waterboarding of terrorism suspects and other harsh interrogation tactics "exercised poor judgment" but will not face discipline for their actions, according to long-awaited Justice Department documents released Friday.

The decision represents the end of a five-year internal battle and flatly rejects recommendations by the department's ethics investigators. They had twice urged that allegations against John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee be sent to state disciplinary authorities for further action, including the possible revocation of their licenses to practice law.

so, against the recommendations of the doj's own ethics investigators, those who labored mightily to offer legal cover for unconstitutional and criminal actions by employees of our government are declared to be above the law by the self-same chain of command - albeit with a few different players - that supervised them in the first place... is this a great country or what...?

[UPDATE]

during the bush administration, i watched conyers grandstand on accountability issues time after time with absolutely no results... if i wasn't so cynical about him and any moves toward real accountability, i might be encouraged by something like this... as things stand now, no... i see it as only an empty gesture, carefully calculated to gain headlines...

Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) has announced that he plans to hold House Judiciary Committee hearings on the Bush administration lawyers whose legal memos justified the use of torture on terrorism detainees.

Conyers' announcement Friday follows the release of a report by the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility which criticizes lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee for "poor judgment" but concludes that their actions did not rise to the level of professional misconduct.

this is the political equivalent of cock-teasing...

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Using fear-mongering to generate support for more "enhanced" detention and interrogation techniques

ya gotta love the euphemism they use - "flexible"... what does "flexible" tell you...? i don't know about you, but "flexible" says to me they want to be able to "bend"... "bend" what, you may ask...? "bend" what's already in place would be my response and what's already in place has been shown time and again to circumvent due process, constitutional rights and the u.n. convention against torture... the next question would be HOW "flexible"...? what exactly is the "flexibility" they're asking for...? i'm not sure i want to know... oh, hell... of COURSE i want to know... we - all of us - NEED to know...

Intelligence officials say al-Qaeda will try to attack U.S. in next 6 months

The Obama administration's top intelligence officials on Tuesday described it as "certain" that al-Qaeda or its allies will try to attack the United States in the next six months, and they called for new flexibility in how U.S. officials detain and question terrorist suspects.

needless to say, in the typical context-free, head-in-the-sand journalism we've come to expect from our news media, the rest of the wapo article completely ignores the flashing red light sitting on top of the call for "new flexibility in how U.S. officials detain and question terrorist suspects"...

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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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Cheney is trying to get everyone to accept that the end justifies the means

according to the big dick, as a country, we are entitled to do whatever it takes - legal, illegal, humane, inhumane, right, wrong, moral or immoral - to attain the ends our controllers and handlers have determined are the ends "we" must achieve...

watch it... it's so straightforward, articulate, eminently reasonable and enough to give me sleepless nights for weeks to come...



that this man is still permitted to serve as a spokesman for my country is a hideous betrayal of accountability and the rule of law, not to mention a pathetic portrayal of the united states to the rest of the world...

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I've never understood those who are so rabidly opposed to the ACLU

imho, they're doing most of the heavy lifting in the seemingly endless battle against our own government to uphold our civil liberties, accountability and the rule of law...

In the spring of 2003, long before Abu Ghraib or secret prisons became part of the American vocabulary, a pair of recently hired lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union noticed a handful of news reports about allegations of abuse of prisoners in American custody.

The lawyers, Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, wondered: Was there a broader pattern of abuse, and could a Freedom of Information Act request uncover it? Some of their colleagues, more experienced with the frustrations of such document demands, were skeptical. One made a tongue-in-cheek offer of $1 for every page they turned up.

Six years later, the detention document request and subsequent lawsuit are among the most successful in the history of public disclosure, with 130,000 pages of previously secret documents released to date and the prospect of more.

The case has produced revelation after revelation: battles between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military over the treatment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp; autopsy reports on prisoners who died in custody in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Justice Department’s long-secret memorandums justifying harsh interrogation methods; and day-by-day descriptions of what happened inside the Central Intelligence Agency’s overseas prisons.

it's not as if we needed the aclu to stoke our suspicions about what's been happening but we sure as hell have needed them to help us move beyond mere suspicions to real facts...

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Note to DOJ Special Prosecutor John Durham: the "Decider" is the one ultimately accountable

david swanson in antemedius...

On April 11, 2008, ABC News produced a video interview of Bush during which he was asked about meetings his top subordinates had held to approve specific instances of torture. Bush said: "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved." The National Security Council's Principals Committee, which held the meetings, included Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, and Attorney General John Ashcroft. In the same interview, Bush defended the use of the drowning torture on prisoner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying: "We had legal opinions that enabled us to do it. And no, I didn't have any problem at all trying to find out what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed knew."

On January 11, 2009, Fox News aired a video interview of Bush in which he admitted personally authorizing the torture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, saying: "One such person who gave us information was Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. … And I’m in the Oval Office and I am told that we have captured Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the professionals believe he has information necessary to secure the country. So I ask what tools are available for us to find information from him and they gave me a list of tools, and I said are these tools deemed to be legal? And so we got legal opinions before any decision was made."

Does anyone else verify this? Well, how about John Yoo and Dick Cheney? On January 29, 2009, John Yoo, a former official in the Office of Legal Counsel who had drafted secret memos authorizing torture, published an article in the Wall Street Journal with the headline "Obama Made a Rash Decision on Gitmo," in which he wrote: "On the advice of his intelligence advisers, the president could have authorized coercive interrogation methods like those used by Israel and Great Britain in their antiterrorism campaigns. (He could even authorize waterboarding, which he did three times in the years after 9/11.)"

On May 10, 2009, former Vice President Cheney appeared on the CBS News television program "Face the Nation." Asked what Bush had known about torture methods, Cheney replied, "I certainly, yes, have every reason to believe he knew -- he knew a great deal about the program. He basically authorized it. I mean, this was a presidential-level decision. And the decision went to the president. He signed off on it."

[...]

OK, but did Bush put his approval down in writing anywhere? He certainly did. On Sept. 17, 2001, Bush produced an executive order authorizing the CIA to set up unacknowledged detention facilities around the world. For years after this date, prisoners in these facilities were not identified to the International Committee of the Red Cross or provided due process. On February 7, 2002, Bush produced a Memorandum for the Vice President, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, the Attorney General, Chief of Staff to the President, Director of Central Intelligence, Assistant to the President for National Security Affairs, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff on the subject of "Humane Treatment of al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees." In this memorandum, Bush "determined" that "none of the provisions of Geneva apply to our conflict with al Qaeda in Afghanistan or elsewhere throughout the world," and "[C]ommon article 3 of Geneva does not apply to either al Qaeda or Taliban detainees," and "[T]he Taliban detainees are unlawful combatants and, therefore, do not qualify as prisoners of war under article 4 of Geneva," and "al Qaeda detainees also do not qualify as prisoners of war."

and, btw, here's a copy of that 7 february memo...

Page 1

Page 2

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I never thought my country would be the proprietor of a bona fide chamber of horrors [UPDATE: Jonathan Turley]

guess what...? everything those of us who have been paying attention THOUGHT has been happening has ACTUALLY been happening...

sometimes i'd really rather be wrong, dontcha know...?

As the session begins, the detainee stands naked, except for a hood covering his head. Guards shackle his arms and legs, then slip a small collar around his neck. The collar will be used later; according to CIA guidelines for interrogations, it will serve as a handle for slamming the detainee's head against a wall.

After removing the hood, the interrogator opens with a slap across the face -- to get the detainee's attention -- followed by other slaps, the guidelines state. Next comes the head-slamming, or "walling," which can be tried once "to make a point," or repeated again and again.

"Twenty or thirty times consecutively" is permissible, the guidelines say, "if the interrogator requires a more significant response to a question." And if that fails, there are far harsher techniques to be tried.

Five years after the CIA's secret detention program came to light, much is known about the spy agency's decision to use harsh techniques, including waterboarding, to pry information from alleged al-Qaeda leaders. Now, with the release late Monday of guidelines for interrogating high-value detainees, the agency has provided -- in its own words -- the first detailed description of the step-by-step procedures used to systematically crush a detainee's will to resist by eliciting stress, exhaustion and fear.

lovely, eh...? and that ain't all...

In 2002, Iraqi Bisher al-Rawi, a permanent resident of Great Britain, was detained by local and CIA officials in the airport in the Republic of Gambia where he had legitimate, work-related business. Mr. al-Rawi recalls of his captors, detailed in In a court filing dated August, 2007, by the ACLU on behalf of five detainees who had been in US custody, or under US authority at various times:

“Then, without speaking, one of his escorts began to gently rub Mr. al-Rawi’s feet as they waited. The kindness of the gesture took Mr. al-Rawi by surprise and seemed to be almost apologetic in nature. Although he could have no idea of what was about to unfold, it was at this point that Mr. al-Rawi became convinced that something awful was about to happen.

After some time, the two Gambian officials stood up and, with Mr. al-Rawi between them, began to walk forward. They released him momentarily but then he was immediately grabbed from behind by two other men and dragged into a small, dark room located somewhere on the perimeter of the airport. In this room, several men and women – hooded and using flashlights to guide them – removed Mr. al-Rawi’s handcuffs and shackles, cut off all his clothes, and dressed him in diapers and different clothing. His handcuffs and shackles were replaced with new ones that were part of some sort of restraining harness. Something was then placed in or around his ears that impaired his hearing and both a blindfold and goggles were placed over his eyes. Mr. al-Rawi was then roughly manhandled on board a waiting aircraft, and once inside was restrained on a stretcher-like platform. For the duration of flight Mr. al-Rawi was unable to move or change position. He was also denied access to food, water, or a toilet. It was all he could do to keep himself from screaming.”

kinda makes the chills run up and down my spine...

as does this...

From the same ACLU legal filing comes the detention of Ahmed Agiza, a 45-year-old pharmacist and Egyptian citizen who had sought asylum in Sweden in 2000 to escape retribution for filing a lawsuit against the Egyptian government. The legal action was a result of torture Mr. Agiza endured while being interrogated about associations of a relative, and through no dubious or illegal actions of his own.

Declared to be a security risk, with no reason given to him or his appointed legal representative, Mr. Agiza was ordered to leave Sweden, and was met by US officials upon his expulsion. He recalls the encounter:

“All of the men wore dark hoods and were dressed in civilian clothes,” the report states. “Mr. Agiza was brought into a small room. There the men conducted a physical search, forcibly sliced off his clothes, including his underwear, inserted suppositories into his rectum, fitted him with a diaper, dressed him in overalls, blindfolded him, and placed a hood over his head. One of the men photographed the whole process.”

land of the free and home of the brave depraved...

[UPDATE]

jonathan turley on olbermann last night via raw story...

“It’s a very curious mandate,” law professor Jonathan Turley told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Tuesday. “I don’t see how he can possibly do what Holder’s asking him to do. … The question here is whether [Special Prosecutor John] Durham will have the leeway — and, frankly, the courage — to recognize the obvious.”

“It’s a bizarre thing for a professional prosecutor to do,” explained Turley, “to go in and say, ‘I’m going to look at a program that’s based on what is a well-defined war crime, and I’m going to see if any of these people went beyond what was authorized by people who were talking about a war crime.’”

“He’s got what are all the elements of a crime,” Turley emphasized, “including dead bodies, by all reports, and the question is, is he going to go after those sort of low-lying fruit targets who went too far, or is he going to go after the people who really set this thing in motion.”

yes, it IS bizarre but at least it's at least a tiny step in the right direction, something that wouldn't have had a snowball's chance in hell pre-obama...

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Another small step - a torture prosecutor

brother tim's comment on my previous post about the small step of releasing the names of detainees to the icrc openly voices his skepticism...

They may throw out a couple of bones, like they do to us, but there'll be no meat on them.

however, i'll still take a small, positive step, even though it may be relatively meaningless, to yet another clearly negative one... for my own mental health, i can't afford to discount even the smallest steps in the right direction...

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they allegedly threatened terrorism suspects, according to two sources familiar with the move.

Holder is poised to name John Durham, a career Justice Department prosecutor from Connecticut, to lead the inquiry, according to the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the process is not complete.

Durham's mandate, the sources added, will be relatively narrow: to look at whether there is enough evidence to launch a full-scale criminal investigation of current and former CIA personnel who may have broken the law in their dealings with detainees. Many of the harshest CIA interrogation techniques have not been employed against terrorism suspects for four years or more.

The attorney general selected Durham in part because the longtime prosecutor is familiar with the CIA and its past interrogation regime. For nearly two years, Durham has been probing whether laws against obstruction or false statements were violated in connection with the 2005 destruction of CIA videotapes. The tapes allegedly depicted brutal scenes including waterboarding of some of the agency's high value detainees. That inquiry is proceeding before a grand jury in Alexandria, although lawyers following the investigation have cast doubt on whether it will result in any criminal charges.

after 8 years of bush and going on 8 months of heavy-duty disappointment in obama, yes, i'm grasping at straws...

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Primum non nocere is a Latin phrase that means "First, do no harm."

uh, hello...? while it may not be the exact wording from the hippocratic oath...

The origin of the phrase is uncertain. The Hippocratic Oath includes the promise "to abstain from doing harm" ... but not the precise phrase. Perhaps the closest approximation in the Hippocratic Corpus is in Epidemics: "The physician must...have two special objects in view with regard to disease, namely, to do good or to do no harm"

regardless, it's a fundamental principle of health care providers, a principle that seems to have been summarily tossed aside by these two characters...

from raw story...

There's an article in today's New York Times about Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, two military retirees and psychologists with no expertise on al-Qaeda, no foreign language skills, no experience in real interrogations, and with no relevant degrees ("...their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy").

Nevertheless, these two seemingly managed to cash in on America's "global war on terror."

With little more than their psychology credentials and "an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists," the pair, known as "Doc Mitchell" and "Doc Jessen" built "a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the CIA," per the Times piece.

The article details the torture and interrogation of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah, described at the time as al-Qaeda's No. 3, by Doc Mitchell and Doc Jessen:

In late July 2002, Dr. Jessen joined [Dr. Mitchell] in Thailand. On Aug. 1, the Justice Department completed a formal legal opinion authorizing the SERE methods, and the psychologists turned up the pressure. Over about two weeks, Mr. Zubaydah was confined in a box, slammed into the wall and waterboarded 83 times.

The brutal treatment stopped only after Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen themselves decided that Mr. Zubaydah had no more information to give up. Higher-ups from headquarters arrived and watched one more waterboarding before agreeing that the treatment could stop, according to a Justice Department legal opinion.

while we're engaged as a nation in the great debate over the future of our health care, it would be wise to keep in mind just how steeped in venality some of our health care providers have become...

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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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Even the SERE experts on torture questioned its value but the Bushies didn't want to hear it

yeah, well, just more fuel for the fire... everything that's coming out now merely validates what we've known all along and basically what's been available in the public domain for years, IF, that is, you've been paying attention...

The military agency that provided advice on harsh interrogation techniques for use against terrorism suspects referred to the application of extreme duress as "torture" in a July 2002 document sent to the Pentagon's chief lawyer and warned that it would produce "unreliable information."

"The unintended consequence of a U.S. policy that provides for the torture of prisoners is that it could be used by our adversaries as justification for the torture of captured U.S. personnel," says the document, an unsigned two-page attachment to a memo by the military's Joint Personnel Recovery Agency.

[...]

The document was included among July 2002 memoranda that described severe techniques used against Americans in past conflicts and the psychological effects of such treatment. JPRA ran the military program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE), which trains pilots and others to resist hostile questioning.

[...]

Daniel Baumgartner, who was the JPRA's chief of staff in 2002 and transmitted the memos and attachments, said the agency "sent a lot of cautionary notes" regarding harsh techniques. "There is a difference between what we do in training and what the administration wanted the information for," he said a telephone interview yesterday. "What the administration decided to do or not to do was up to the guys dealing with offensive prisoner operations. . . . We train our own people for the worst possible outcome . . . and obviously the United States government does not torture its own people."

Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said he thinks the attachment was deliberately ignored and perhaps suppressed. Excerpts from the document appeared in a report on the treatment of detainees released this month by Levin's committee. The report says the attachment echoes JPRA warnings issued in late 2001.

"It's part of a pattern of squelching dissent," said Levin, who added that there were other instances in which internal reviews of detainee treatment were halted or undercut. "They didn't want to hear the downside."

the united states has operated from an ideological perspective for a long, long time, ideology based on such dogmas as free markets, united states exceptionalism, undiluted materialism, our right to appropriate resources for our own use wherever they may be in the world, and the universal applicability of the american way of life... the bush administration, however, made the application of such political and economic ideology an ideology in itself, an ideology to be practiced totally and without reservation, and with special punishment reserved for those who dared to deviate... the nation may have indicated a strong desire to check itself in to re-hab in the last election, but we've still yet to show up for the first treatment session...

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The US is bound under the UN Convention against Torture to prosecute it

so, let's get crackin' on it, shall we...?

CIA torture exemption 'illegal'

US President Barack Obama's decision not to prosecute CIA agents who used torture tactics is a violation of international law, a UN expert says.

The UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, says the US is bound under the UN Convention against Torture to prosecute those who engage in it.

Mr Obama released four "torture memos" outlining harsh interrogation methods sanctioned by the Bush administration.

Mr Nowak has called for an independent review and compensation for victims.

"The United States, like all other states that are part of the UN convention against torture, is committed to conducting criminal investigations of torture and to bringing all persons against whom there is sound evidence to court," Mr Nowak told the Austrian daily Der Standard.

i'm still trying - and failing - to wrap my feeble brain around the image of someone being waterboarded ONE HUNDRED EIGHTY-THREE TIMES IN ONE MONTH (see previous post)... we cannot, as a nation that purports to adhere to its constitution and respect accountability and the rule of law, allow crimes of this magnitude to go unprosecuted...

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Accountability for torture - will we EVER see it...?

i'm not wild about this decision, to say the least, but i might find it a little easier to swallow IF it was combined with an announcement that those responsible for authorizing the torture-based interrogation techniques were going to be held accountable... unfortunately, whatever hope i might have held for the restoration of accountability and the rule of law under obama is fast fading...

Administration: No Charges Over CIA's Enhanced Interrogations
Justice Department releases Bush-era legal memos about harsh techniques used by CIA interrogators on terrorism suspects. Obama says that no charges will be filed against CIA agents who were operating "in good faith."

in case we've lost sight of just exactly WHO is accountable, here's the february 7, 2002, memorandum from george bush officially opening the door to the whole goddam mess...

Page 1


Page 2


and here's the december 2, 2002, memo from donald rumsfeld adding his authorization to those techniques... this is the memo that contains the infamous hand-written comment from the donald asking why, when HE stands for 8-10 hours a day, a detainee is limited to only 4 hours...



here's the january 25, 2002, alberto gonzales memo specifically waiving the geneva conventions...



below are links to the complete list of the specific techniques that were authorized for use in iraq on september 14, 2003, by general ricardo sanchez, who has since tried to cover his ass, a la richard armitage (see previous post), by repudiating the use of "enhanced interrogation techniques," AFTER perjuring himself before the senate armed services committee on may 19, 2004 (see my archive of previous posts here)...


General Ricardo Sanchez, Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy, Transmittal Memorandum

General Ricardo Sanchez, Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy, Cover Memorandum

General Ricardo Sanchez, Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy, Interrogation Techniques, A-L

General Ricardo Sanchez, Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy, Interrogation Techniques, M-X

General Ricardo Sanchez, Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy, Interrogation Techniques, Y-CC

General Ricardo Sanchez, Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy, Interrogation Techniques, General Safeguards

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