Crapaganda.com

“Law must apply to everyone equally or it’s not law at all. Those who are pushing the other view have a misguided idea of what law is all about.” – Benjamin Ferencz

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) released today the results of a landmark investigation that, according to the organization’s press release, “uncovered evidence that indicates the Bush administration apparently conducted illegal and unethical human experimentation and research on detainees in CIA custody.” PHR is asking President Obama to “order the attorney general to undertake an immediate criminal investigation of alleged illegal human experimentation and research on detainees conducted by the CIA and other government agencies following the attacks on Sept. 11, 2001.” They are also seeking other investigations by Congress, the Department of Health and Human Services, and the Department of Justice.

As PHR’s White Paper — “Experiments in Torture: Evidence of Human Subject Research and Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program” (PDF) — makes clear, illegal experimentation upon human subjects was an integral part of the Bush/Cheney/CIA “enhanced interrogation” program (EIP) from the very beginning. Medical and psychologist monitors were used to collect and analyze data from the EIP interrogations in order “to derive generalizable inferences to be applied to subsequent interrogations.” The use of illegal experimentation both reveals the actual parameters of the torture program, and raises the stakes surrounding the need for accountability for these actions to a new level.

According to PHR’s White Paper:

Such acts may be seen as the conduct of research and experimentation by health professionals on prisoners, which could violate accepted standards of medical ethics, as well as domestic and international law. These practices could, in some cases, constitute war crimes and crimes against humanity.

The charges are expected to resonate throughout the legal, human rights and religious communities. The executive director of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT), Rev Richard Killmer, commenting in a press release on PHR’s report, said he deplored the “deeply disturbing evidence that our government committed, in our names, forced human experimentation that recalls some of humanity’s darkest days — charges from which no person of faith can afford to turn away.” (NRCAT has also released a new video today, “Accounting for Torture.”)

Research Violated U.S. and International Law

PHR’s CEO Frank Donaghue states, “The CIA appears to have broken all accepted legal and ethical standards put in place since the Second World War to protect prisoners from being the subjects of experimentation.”

PHR examined three instances of the CIA’s illegal medical research, although it should be understood this most likely does not constitute the full extent of the torture research program. Some of the experiments concerned the elaboration of more extensive forms of waterboarding, testing the use of large-volumes of water, the use of saline solution as a substitute for plain water, as well as the use of ancillary equipment, such as a gurney that could swing the prisoner into different angles, and use of a blood oximeter to measure subject vital signs and calibrate them with experimental techniques. The CIA also experimented on different levels of sleep deprivation in order to assess effects and coordinate practice with legal definitions constructed by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

In one gruesome set of experiments, at least 25 detainees were submitted to both individual and combined use of the different “enhanced interrogation” techniques developed by the CIA through reverse-engineering of the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, techniques which were originally developed to inoculate U.S. military personnel against torture. The purpose of this experiment, monitored by doctors, was to ascertain the effects of the different combinations of techniques as they pertained to “susceptibility to severe pain,” attempting thereby to calibrate levels of pain in order to keep the interrogations within the dubious frontiers of legality proposed by John Yoo and Jay Bybee in their infamous torture memos.

The purpose of this experimental program was apparently to help provide legal cover for the torture program, as well as both examine the effects of torture upon live subjects, and further the design of the torture program itself. No existing research protocol has come to light, and the evidence has been organized via the use of open source documents and FOIA releases. From these sources, one can see that the use of medical monitors and experimental medical data was used as supposed “good faith” evidence against possible prosecution for torture.

A Legal Limbo

The actions of the Bush Administration to legally justify their torture program via the use of executive orders and OLC rulings has been well-documented. Only last February, the Department of Justice’s Office of Professional Conduct released their finding that the actions of Yoo and Bybee in constructing the 2002 memos that authorized torture did not amount to unprofessional or unethical conduct, but simply constituted “bad judgment.” Whatever the judgment upon the OLC memos, it is apparent the use of torture pre-dated the OLC approval of the EIP.

While there is some evidence that the Bush administration was concerned with loosening the legal parameters surrounding research using human subjects (story to come), there is no evidence, as PHR’s White Paper points out, that OLC ever considered the legality of the medical monitoring of prisoners as part of the CIA torture program. According to Director of PHR’s Campaign Against Torture and lead report author, Nathaniel A. Raymond, “Justice Department lawyers appear to have never assessed the lawfulness of the alleged research on detainees in CIA custody, despite how essential it appears to have been to their legal cover for torture.” But, after a number of Supreme Court decisions, culminating in the Hamdan v Rumsfeld ruling in June 2006, the government apparently had second thoughts about its legal liabilities.

One of the most original pieces of research in the PHR report concerns the rewriting of the War Crimes Act (WCA) as part of the 2006 Military Commissions Act (MCA). Concerned, it would seem, over their vulnerability to criminal prosecution for illegal and unethical research conducted upon detainees, including, as I’ve pointed out before, Abu Zubaydah, the Bush administration amended the WCA language in the MCA to weaken the protections against the strict prohibitions against scientific experiments on prisoners found in the Geneva Conventions. These changes were then made retroactive to 1997, which suggests the U.S. government was shielding interrogators and other officials for illegal acts going back four years prior to 9/11. And to their shame, Congress passed this legislation, and the language on the WCA was then retained by the Democratic Party-controlled Congress when the MCA was amended in 2009.

One of PHR’s recommendations in their report is that Congress undertake a revision of the War Crimes Act “to eliminate changes made to the Act in 2006 which weaken the prohibition on biological experimentation on detainees, and ensure that the War Crimes Act definition of the grave breach of biological experimentation is consistent with the definition of that crime under the Geneva Conventions.”

Outstanding Issues To Be Resolved

It has been some years since the experimental aspects of the torture program were first recognized. The breach of medical ethics by doctors was first discussed by M. Gregg Bloche and Jonathan H. Marks in the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2005. In July 2005, a New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, “The Experiment,” looked at the “reverse-engineering” of the SERE techniques, and noted both the prohibition on scientific experiments of prisoners in Geneva, and the “[n]umerous experiments aimed at documenting trainees’ stress levels… conducted by sere-affiliated scientists.”

One of the authors of the PHR report, Stephen Soldz, wrote about the experimental aspects of “behavioral science-based torture techniques” in use at Guantanamo in a August 2006 article. In 2007, physician Steven Miles noted the experimental aspects of the Al Qahtani interrogation at Guantanamo in late 2002 – early 2003. The experimental aspect of the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah was broached by FBI agent Ali Soufan in testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2009. Soufan’s presence at the Zubaydah interrogation in April-May 2002 led him to characterize a CIA contractor’s treatment of Zubaydah as an experiment (“Once again the contractor insisted on stepping up the notches of his experiment…”). The contractor is believed to have been former SERE psychologist, James Mitchell.

The PHR report should not be seen as a full history of the torture-experimentation program, but is a blueprint offering the outlines of what that program consisted of and how it progressed. For instance, except for Khalid Sheik Mohammed, none of the CIA prisoners are named in the report, although it is noted that “the authorized policy of using multiple ["enhanced interrogation" techniques] simultaneously was officially based on medical observations of 25 detainees.”

A full understanding of all that happened awaits future investigations. A more comprehensive understanding of the issues raised, e.g., the development of the waterboarding and sleep deprivation techniques, has been investigated by Marcy Wheeler at Emptywheel/Firedoglake, while the torture of Abu Zubaydah has been intensively covered by Jason Leopold at Truthout. Leopold noted the “extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials” on matters such as “medical updates” and “behavioral comments.”

In an article last April, I noted that “psychologist’s notes” had been cataloged as a part of Abu Zubaydah’s interrogation materials. Such notes would indicate just what variables of interest were being recorded by the psychological experimenter, especially given recent revelations in a story by Jason Leopold that a second taping system was used in the interrogation of Zubaydah, with “torture sessions that were stored on computers and separate hard drives.”

Variables of interest to CIA psychologists might include head movements and hand movements, facial expressions or microexpressions, used in detecting deception or behavioral manifestations of stress. These types of observation are synonymous with computer analysis and argue for the use of a digital video system or the transfer of analog video into data stored on magnetic or optical media. The same release of documents… also described CIA officials asking for “instructions” regarding the “disposition of hard drives and magnetic media” associated with the torture of Zubaydah.

Among the various threads left dangling from the PHR investigation, none concerns me more than the links between the SERE research undertaken by investigators led by Dr. Charles A. Morgan and the CIA experimental torture program, as reported in an appendix to PHR’s report. In an appendix to their report, PHR describes the SERE research undertaken during the years prior to the issuance of the OLC memos, and explains that the results of that research demonstrated how the risk of harm was inherent in the SERE techniques. In addition, they note, “the experimental framework of these studies intentionally or unintentionally laid the groundwork for unethical and illegal human experimentation that would follow.”

The full details of my own investigation into those links were published back in September 2009.

What is indisputable is that by virtue of his position, Dr. Morgan had access to CIA officials just at the time that another department of the CIA, one to which he is affiliated, was, according to the CIA’s own Office of Inspector General Report (large PDF) involved in vetting the SERE techniques for use in interrogations….

… it looks like the CIA used DOD/JPRA as a cover for the safety of techniques that it knew were in fact harmful from their own analysis of the “data.” [JRPA, or Joint Recovery Personnel Agency is, among other things, the "Executive Agency" for the SERE training schools.]

One especially lingering thread concerns the assertion in the PHR report that all of Dr. Morgan’s SERE research had been properly vetted by Institutional Research Boards. While this is true for his published research, a report for which Dr. Morgan is listed as second author, The War Fighter’s Stress Response: Telemetric and Noninvasive Assessment, conducted on behalf of the U.S. Army Medical Research and Materiel Command at Ft. Detrick, beginning approximately in November 2001, states — even by its final addendum in October 2003 — that “due to Institutional Review Board delays no human subjects data are available.”

The exact interactions between CIA and DoD/JPRA, between the White House and both DoD and CIA, the role of other actors, such as the Defense Intelligence Agency and Joint Special Operations Command, not to mention the actual origins of the torture research program, remain unclear. It is a vital necessity that that investigations take place, and hopefully PHR’s report will provide the added impetus to push this issue to the forefront of a tired, confused, and frightened country, a country misled in so many ways over the past decade, and now forced to confront the full panoply of evil that has resulted from having a portion of the government held apart from public scrutiny. That must end now.

Source: FireDogLake

George W. Bush’s casual acknowledgment Wednesday that he had Khalid Sheikh Mohammed waterboarded — and would do it again — has horrified some former military and intelligence officials who argue that the former president doesn’t seem to understand the gravity of what he is admitting.

Waterboarding, a form of controlled drowning, is “unequivocably torture”, said retired Brigadier General David R. Irvine, a former strategic intelligence officer who taught prisoner of war interrogation and military law for 18 years.

“As a nation, we have historically prosecuted it as such, going back to the time of the Spanish-American War,” Irvine said. “Moreover, it cannot be demonstrated that any use of waterboarding by U.S. personnel in recent years has saved a single American life.”

Irvine told the Huffington Post that Bush doesn’t appreciate how much harm his countenancing of torture has done to his country.

“Yeah, we waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” Bush told a Grand Rapids audience Wednesday, of the self-professed 9/11 mastermind. “I’d do it again to save lives.”

But, Irvine said: “When he decided to do it the first time, he launched the nation down a disastrous road, and we will continue to pay dearly for the damage his decision has caused.

“We are seen by the rest of the world as having abandoned our commitment to international law. We have forfeited enormous amounts of moral leadership as the world’s sole remaining superpower. And it puts American troops in greater danger — and unnecessary danger.”

James P. Cullen, a retired brigadier general in the United States Army Reserve Judge Advocate General’s Corps, told HuffPost that the net effect of Bush’s remarks — and former Vice President Cheney’s before him — is “to establish a precedent where it will be permissible to our enemies to use waterboarding on our servicemen in future wars.

Cheney famously once agreed with an interviewer that “a dunk in the water” was “no-brainer” if it saves lives.

“This is not the last war we’re going to fight,” Cullen said. “Americans not yet born are going to be prisoners of war in those conflicts. And our enemies are going to be able to point back to President Bush and Vice President Cheney saying that waterboarding is OK.

“It’s just shocking to me how he can be so flip about something that is so serious,” Cullen said.

Matthew Alexander, the pseudonymous former Air Force interrogator and author of “How To Break A Terrorist” e-mailed HuffPost that Bush’s statement “is de facto approval of the deaths of hundreds, if not thousands, of American soldiers in Iraq who were killed by foreign fighters that Al Qaida recruited based on the President’s policy of torture and abuse of detainees.

“At least now we know where the blame for those soldiers’ deaths squarely belongs. President Bush’s decision broke with a military tradition dating back to General George Washington during the Revolutionary War and the consequences are clear: Al Qaida is stronger and our country is less safe.”

Cullen and Irvine are among 15 former military and intelligence officials currently working with Human Rights First in Pennsylvania, meeting with congressional candidates from both parties to help inform them about issues of prisoner treatment and interrogation.

Source: Huffington Post

The documents show that, despite Goss’ agreement, officials almost immediately began worrying they’d done something improper, foreshadowing a controversy that has lingered for years and remains under FBI investigation.

The videos showed CIA interrogators using waterboarding, a simulated drowning technique, on terrorism suspect Abu Zubaydah. The videos showed that interrogators did not follow the waterboarding procedures authorized by President George W. Bush’s administration, the documents show.

Jose Rodriguez, the agency’s top clandestine officer, worried the tapes would be “devastating” to the CIA if they ever surfaced, the documents show.

Rodriguez told Goss and others he “felt it was extremely important to destroy the tapes and that if there was any heat, he would take it,” according to a November 2005 e-mail. Goss laughed, according to the e-mail, and said he’d be the one to take the heat.

The e-mail then states: “PG, however, agreed with the decision.”

The author of the e-mail was blacked out, and it’s not clear whether Goss agreed that destroying the tapes was a wise decision or whether he gave formal approval. Goss has not discussed the matter publicly.

The e-mails, released late Thursday by the Justice Department under a Freedom of Information Act request by the American Civil Liberties Union, showed that Bush’s top lawyer, Miers, and her CIA counterpart, John Rizzo, were both angry the tapes were destroyed.

“Rizzo is clearly upset because he was on the hook to notify Harriet Miers of the status of the tapes because it was she who had asked to be advised before any action was taken,” reads a November 2005 e-mail from an unidentified CIA officer to the agency’s No. 3 official, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo. “Apparently, Rizzo called Harriet this afternoon and she was livid.”

The e-mail correctly predicts: “Rizzo does not think this is likely to just go away.”

Years later, prosecutor John Durham is still investigating whether any crime was committed.

“These documents provide further evidence that senior CIA officials were willing to risk being prosecuted for obstruction of justice in order to avoid being prosecuted for torture,” ACLU lawyer Ben Wizner said. “If the Department of Justice fails to hold these officials accountable, they will have succeeded in their cover-up.”

CIA spokesman George Little said the agency continues to cooperate with that investigation.

“We hope that this issue is resolved soon,” Little said.

Source: AP

By Andy Worthington

The story of Abu Zubaydah — a Saudi-born Palestinian whose real name is Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn — has always been absolutely central to the “War on Terror.” Seized in a house raid in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, he was immediately touted as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations and top recruiter,” who would be able to “provide the names of terrorists around the world and which targets they planned to hit.” He then pretty much vanished off the face of the earth for four and a half years.

In September 2006, he resurfaced in Guantánamo, when President Bush announced that he was one of 14 “high-value detainees,” previously held in secret CIA prisons, whose existence had been resolutely denied by the administration until that point.

In a speech on September 6, 2006, Bush finally conceded that “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war [on terror] have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency,” and claimed that when Abu Zubaydah, who he described as “a senior terrorist leader and a trusted associate of Osama bin Laden,” became “defiant and evasive” after his capture, “the CIA used an alternative set of procedures. These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution, and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.”

This was a reference to the CIA’s torture program for “high-value detainees,” which was first publicly revealed when a memo that purported to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA, written by Justice Department lawyer John Yoo and issued in August 2002, was leaked in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004.

However, another narrative had already appeared to challenge the one put forward by the President. In June 2006, Ron Suskind’s book The One Percent Doctrine was published, which explained, as I described it in an article a year ago, that:

Zubaydah “turned out to be mentally ill and nothing like the pivotal figure they supposed him to be,” in the words of Barton Gellman, who reviewed Suskind’s book for the Washington Post in 2006. He “appeared to know nothing about terrorist operations,” and was, instead, the “go-to guy for minor logistics — travel for wives and children and the like” …
Suskind described how, through a close scrutiny of his diaries, in which FBI analysts found entries in the voices of three people — a boy, a young man and a middle-aged alter ego — which recorded in numbing detail, over the course of ten years, “what people ate, or wore, or trifling things they said,” Dan Coleman, the FBI’s senior expert on al-Qaeda, told his superiors, “This guy is insane, certifiable, split personality.”

Since then, more and more compelling evidence has emerged to demonstrate that Abu Zubaydah was indeed nothing more than a “safehouse keeper” with mental health problems, who “claimed to know more about al-Qaeda and its inner workings than he really did,” and a “kind of travel agent” for would-be jihadists, who “was not even an official member of al-Qaeda.” This included Abu Zubaydah’s own testimony at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal at Guantánamo in 2007, when he stated that he was tortured by the CIA to admit that he worked with Osama bin Laden, but insisted, “I’m not his partner and I’m not a member of al-Qaeda.”

Moreover, following on from Ron Suskind’s explanation of how “The United States would torture a mentally disturbed man and then leap, screaming, at every word he uttered,” further confirmation was also provided that his torture yielded no significant information and led only to vast amounts of the intelligence agencies’ time being wasted on false leads. A year ago, summing up the results of Zubaydah’s torture, a former intelligence official stated, bluntly, “We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms.”

In addition, the details of the torture program that was specifically developed for use on Abu Zubaydah have also been revealed — primarily through a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross report (PDF), based on interviews with the “high-value detainees,” including Abu Zubaydah, and also through other Justice Department “torture memos” released by the Obama administration last April. The grim list of techniques includes waterboarding (a form of controlled drowning), confinement in tiny, coffin-like boxes, prolonged sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, and the use of violence and stress positions, sustained nudity, loud music and noise.

Given all these facts — that the Bush administration implemented torture for use on a man whose importance was hideously overstated, which led to no useful intelligence and a hideous waste of the agencies’ time — Abu Zubaydah’s story is one of the most distressing examples of hubris in the whole of the Bush administration’s brutally inept “War on Terror,” but his story has not come to an end, of course, and his continued detention, and the Obama administration’s attempts to justify it, continue to throw up new revelations, as was made clear just last week when a court submission filed by the government in September 2009 was unclassified.

In response to 213 requests by Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers for discovery in his habeas corpus petition, the government itself provided the most comprehensive rebuttal to date of the kind of claims put forward by the Bush administration in defense of its torture program, and, specifically, its claims regarding Abu Zubaydah, on the basis that requests for discovery are only relevant when they refer to claims made by the government.
In seeking to turn down the lawyers’ requests, the government revealed that it “has not contended … that Petitioner was a member of al-Qaeda or otherwise formally identified with al-Qaeda” and “has not contended that Petitioner had any personal involvement in planning or executing either the 1998 embassy bombings in Nairobi, Kenya, and Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania, or the attacks of September 11, 2001.”

Instead, the government now claims that the ongoing detention of Abu Zubaydah “is based on conduct and actions that establish Petitioner was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces,” and that he “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001.

In response, as Jason Leopold reported for Truthout:

Zubaydah’s attorneys claim that “the persons whom [Zubaydah] assisted in escaping Afghanistan in 2001 included ‘women, children, and/or other non-combatants’” and that the government has evidence to support those assertions. The lawyers also questioned the government’s history of falsehoods about their client.

“The Government’s accounts frequently have been at variance with the actual facts, and the government has generally been loath to provide the facts until forced to do so,” said Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, in an interview. “When the Government was forced to present the facts in the form of discovery in Zubaydah’s case, it realized that the game was over and there was no way it could support the Bush administration’s baseless allegations. So it changed the charges.”

Mickum continued, “I’m not surprised at all that the Government has dropped the old charges against our client and is alleging new charges against him. That is their tried-and-true modus operandi … [W]hen their case falls apart, they re-jigger the evidence, and come up with new charges and [say] ‘we will defend the new charges with the same zeal we defended the earlier bogus charges.’”

Since taking up Abu Zubaydah’s case and filing a habeas corpus petition in February 2008, his lawyers have always maintained not only that their client was not a member of al-Qaeda, but also that Khaldan, the training camp for which he was the “safehouse keeper,” was closed down by the Taliban in 2000 after the camp’s leader refused to allow it to come under the control of Osama bin Laden. Even the government now accepts that Khaldan was “organizationally and operationally independent of al-Qaeda,” and as Brent Mickum told Jason Leopold, reviewing all of the above, “We have never deviated from that position, and now the government admits that we were correct all along.”

These extensive concessions on the part of the government seem only to reveal that the Justice Department is painting itself into a corner with Abu Zubaydah, engaged in a slow-moving legal process, which senior officials must be hoping can be strung out indefinitely. Otherwise, profoundly difficult truths will emerge — about the extent of Abu Zubaydah’s torture, its particular futility, and, it should be noted, his relationship to Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of Khaldan who turned down Osama bin Laden.

Rendered to Egypt after his capture at the end of 2001, al-Libi was tortured until he confessed that Saddam Hussein was helping al-Qaeda obtain chemical weapons, a wildly improbable scenario, which, nevertheless, was used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. What makes the revival of al-Libi’s story particularly unappealing for the US government is that, after years of detention in secret prisons, he was returned to Libya, where, last May, he conveniently died in prison — reportedly by committing suicide — just three days before the US embassy reopened in Tripoli after being closed for 40 years.

When it comes to dealing with Khaldan, the stories of Abu Zubaydah and Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi not only demonstrate the Bush administration’s legacy at its most toxic and self-defeating, but also at its most cruel and pointless, from which, it seems clear, there is no easy way out.

Source: Eurasia Review

More than seven years ago, a suspected Afghan militant was brought to a dimly lit CIA compound northeast of the airport in Kabul. The CIA called it the Salt Pit. Inmates knew it as the dark prison.

Inside a chilly cell, the man was shackled and left half-naked. He was found dead, exposed to the cold, in the early hours of Nov. 20, 2002.

The Salt Pit death was the only fatality known to have occurred inside the secret prison network the CIA operated abroad after the Sept. 11 attacks. The death had strong repercussions inside the CIA. It helped lead to a review that uncovered abuses in detention and interrogation procedures, and forced the agency to change those procedures.

Little has emerged about the Afghan’s death, which the Justice Department is investigating. The Associated Press has learned the dead man’s name, as well as new details about his capture in Pakistanand his Afghan imprisonment.

The man was Gul Rahman (gool RAHK’-mahn), a suspected militant captured on Oct. 29, 2002, a U.S. official familiar with the case confirmed. The official said Rahman was taken during an operation against Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, an insurgent group headed by Afghan warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar (gool-boo-DEEN’ hek-mat-YAR’) and allied with al-Qaida.

Rahman’s identity also was confirmed by a former U.S. official familiar with the case, as well as by several other former and current officials. A reference to Rahman’s death also turned up in a recently declassified government document.

The CIA’s program of waterboarding and other harsh treatment of suspected terrorists has been debated since it ended in 2006. The Salt Pit case stands as a cautionary tale about the unfettered use of such practices. The Obama administration shut the CIA’s prisons last year.

It remains uncertain whether any intelligence officers have been punished as a result of the Afghan’s death, raising questions about the CIA’s accountability in the case. The CIA’s then-station chief in Afghanistan was promoted after Rahman’s death, and the officer who ran the prison went on to other assignments, including one overseas, several former intelligence officials said.

The CIA declined to discuss the Salt Pit case and denied a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by the AP.

Rahman was taken into custody in Islamabad with four others. They included Dr. Ghairat Baheer, a physician who is Hekmatyar’s son-in-law and a leader of Hezb-e-Islami, an insurgent faction blamed for numerous bombings and violence in Afghanistan.

Baheer, who said he spent six months in the Salt Pit during six years in Afghan prisons, said in an interview in Islamabad that he never learned what happened to Rahman. Rahman’s family repeatedly pressed International Red Cross officials about his fate, Baheer said.

“If he died there in interrogation or he died a natural death, they should have told his family and ended their uncertainty,” Baheer said.

This account of the Salt Pit case was assembled from documents and interviews with both militants and officials in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and with more than two dozen current and former U.S. officials. The Americans spoke on condition of anonymity because the details of the case remain classified.

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A federal appeals court says three Seattle police officers did not employ excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a visibly pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket.

The lawyer representing Malaika Brooks said Monday that the court’s 2-1 decision sanctioned “pain compliance” tactics through a modern-day version of the cattle prod.

“To inflict pain on a person if that person is not doing what the police want that person to do is simply outrageous,” said Eric Zubel, the woman’s attorney. “I cannot say that loud enough.”

Zubel said he would ask the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals to rehear Friday’s 2-1 decision that drew a sharp dissent from Judge Marsha Berzon:

“Refusing to sign a speeding ticket was at the time a nonarrestable misdemeanor; now, in Washington, it is not even that. Brooks had no weapons and had not harmed or threatened to harm a soul,”  Berzon wrote. “Although she had told the officers she was seven months pregnant, they proceeded to use a Taser on her, not once but three times, causing her to scream with pain and leaving burn marks and permanent scars.”

The majority noted that the M26 Taser was set in “stun mode” and did not cause as much pain as when set on “dart mode.” The majority noted that the circuit’s recent and leading decision on the issue concerned excessive force in the context of a Taser being set on Dart mode, which causes “neuro-muscular incapacitation.”

Stun mode, the court noted, didn’t rise to the level of excessive force because it imposes “temporary, localized pain only.”

The majority reversed a lower court judge who said the woman’s rights were violated. The lower court’s failure to distinguish between the two levels of pain modes “led the court to err in finding excessive force.”

The woman was driving her 12-year-old to the African American Academy in Seattle when she was pulled over on suspicion of speeding in 2004. The child left the car for school and a verbal spat with the police resulted in the woman receiving three, 50,000-volt shocks, first to her thigh, then shoulder and neck while she was in her vehicle. An officer was holding Brooks’ arm behind Brooks’ back while she was being shocked.

Brooks gave the officer her driver’s license, but Brooks refused to sign the ticket — believing it was akin to signing a confession. She was ultimately arrested for refusing to sign and to comply with officers asking her to exit the vehicle.

“A suspect who repeatedly refuses to comply with instructions or leave her car escalates the risk involved for officers unable to predict what type of noncompliance might come next,” Judge Cynthia Holcomb Hall wrote for the majority. She was joined by Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain.

“Therefore, while using the Taser three times makes this a closer case, we find that it does not show excessive force in light of the corresponding escalation of Brooks’ resistance and the fact that it was the third tasing that appeared to dislodge her such that the officers could finally extract her from her car and gain control over her,” Hall wrote.

Source: Wired.com

President George W. Bush’s legal counsel and chief “torture architect” John Yoo didn’t receive a warm welcome from everyone at the University of Virginia during a speech Tuesday.

Yoo, who was instrumental in constructing the legal framework with which the Bush administration carried out harsh interrogation techniques, intended to speak about his new book, Crisis and Command. But some members of the audience refused to ignore his transgressions.

According to the Charlottesville, VA newspaper C-Ville, one man shouted at Yoo and then told the audience, “I can’t believe that you all would actually tolerate a war criminal in your midst! It speaks volumes about this country and the state that we’re in!” He was promptly escorted out by the police.

Watch John Yoo try to sell his book while being shouted down

See also: John Yoo’ Speech Disrupted at Johns Hopkins University (YouTube)

A terror war prisoner, once considered of such high value by the Bush administration that former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld ordered he be tortured, has taken his first step toward freedom thanks to a federal district court judge, who ordered the government to free him after nearly 10 years of imprisonment at Guantanamo Bay.

Though 39-year-old Mohamedou Slahi, an alleged 9/11 conspirator, won his habeas corpus appeal before U.S. District Judge James Robertson on Monday, he likely does not know it yet. That’s because the judge’s decision was classified, according to published reports.

“After the [9/11] attacks, he was fingered by a senior al Qaeda operative for helping assemble the so-called Hamburg cell, which included the hijacker who piloted United 175 into the South Tower,” The Wall Street Journal reported in 2007.

After being captured and imprisoned in Guantanamo Bay, he was repeatedly subjected to torture by his American captors, with Rumsfeld himself ordering “special” interrogation tactics be set aside for Slahi.

“For a sampling of what Slahi experienced at Guantanamo, check out page 139 of the Senate Armed Services Committee’s 2008 report into the abuse of detainees in the custody of the Department of Defense,” Washington Independent reporter Spencer Ackerman noted.

The Senate report reads:

The memoranda indicate that, on several occasions from July 8 through July 17, Slahi was interrogated by a masked interrogator called “Mr. X.” On July 8, 2003 Slahi was interrogated by Mr. X and was “exposed to various lighting patterns and rock music, to the tune of Drowning Pool’s ‘Let The Bodies Hit [the] Floor.’” On July 10, 2003 Slahi was placed in an interrogation room handcuffed and standing while the air conditioning was turned off until the room became “quite warm.” The next day, Slahi was brought into the interrogation booth and again remained standing and handcuffed while the air conditioning was again turned off. After allowing Slahi to sit, the interrogator later “took [Slahi's] chair and left him standing for several hours.” According to the memo, Slahi was “visibly uncomfortable and showed signs of fatigue. This was 4th day of long duration interrogations.”

On July 17, 2003, the masked interrogator told Slahi about a dream he had where he saw “four detainees that were chained together at the feet. They dug a hole that was six feet long, six feet deep, and four feet wide. Then he observed the detainees throw a plain, unpainted, pine casket with the number 760 [Slahi's internment serial number (ISN)] painted on it in orange on the ground.”

On August 2, 2003 an interrogator told Slahi “to use his imagination and think up the worst possible thing that could happen to him” and asked him “what scares him more than anything else.”

“He’s been incarcerated, tortured and interrogated and rendered illegally,” attorney Nancy Hollander told The Miami Herald. “After almost 10 years the government has not been able to meet the minimal burden to detain him that’s required under habeas. He should be free.”

However, the government will not be freeing Slahi any time soon. First, government attorneys must decide whether they will appeal Judge Robertson’s secret decision.

Slahi’s case is made more notable by the involvement of a key Bush administration whistleblower, Lieutenant Colonel Stuart Couch, a government prosecutor who refused to bring charges against Slahi after learning of his torture.

“I felt like what had been done to Slahi just reprehensible,” Couch said during a Sept. 2009 interview with PBS. ” For that reason alone, I refused to have any further participation in this case.”

“Slahi faces no criminal charges,” McClatchy Newspapers reported. “He arrived at Guantanamo in August 2002, nearly a year after he turned himself in for questioning in his native Mauritania in late September 2001 and found himself handed over first to Jordan for interrogation and then to U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

“He filed his petition for habeas corpus himself in handwritten English on March 3, 2005, on a form provided by prison camp staff.”

Source: Rawstory.com

A French TV documentary features people in a spoof game show administering what they are told are near lethal electric shocks to rival contestants.

Those taking part are told to pull levers to inflict shocks – increasing in voltage – upon their opponents.

Although unaware that the contestants were actors and there was no electrical current, 82% of participants in the Game of Death agreed to pull the lever.

Programme makers say they wanted to expose the dangers of reality TV shows.

They say the documentary shows how many participants in the setting of a TV show will agree to act against their own principles or moral codes when ordered to do something extreme.

The Game of Death has all the trappings of a traditional TV quiz show, with a roaring crowd chanting “punishment” and a glamorous hostess urging the players on.

Christophe Nick, the maker of the documentary, said they were “amazed” that so many participants obeyed the sadistic orders of the game show presenter.

“They are not equipped to disobey,” he told AFP.

“They don’t want to do it, they try to convince the authority figure that they should stop, but they don’t manage to.”

Yale experiment

The results reflect those of a similar experiment carried out almost 50 years ago at Yale University by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.

Participants took the role of a teacher, delivering what they believed were shocks to an actor every time they answered a question incorrectly.

Mr Nick says that his experiment shows that the TV element further increases people’s willingness to obey.

“With Milgram, 62% of people obeyed an abject authority. In the setting of television, it’s 80%,” he told Reuters.

The documentary was broadcast on the state-owned France 2 channel on Wednesday evening.

Self-proclaimed waterboarding fan Dick Cheney called it a no-brainer in a 2006 radio interview: Terror suspects should get a “a dunk in the water.” But recently released internal documents reveal the controversial “enhanced interrogation” practice was far more brutal on detainees than Cheney’s description sounds, and was administered with meticulous cruelty.

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

“This is revolting and it is deeply disturbing,” said Dr. Scott Allen, co-director of the Center for Prisoner Health and Human Rights at Brown University who has reviewed all of the documents for Physicians for Human Rights. “The so-called science here is a total departure from any ethics or any legitimate purpose. They are saying, ‘This is how risky and harmful the procedure is, but we are still going to do it.’ It just sounds like lunacy,” he said. “This fine-tuning of torture is unethical, incompetent and a disgrace to medicine.”

Read the rest of the story at: Waterboarding for dummies (Salon)

Watch Christopher Hitchens Get Waterboarded (Vanity Fair)