Crapaganda.com

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)

The US Government is finally investing in the science of torture.  It seems that since the Revolutionary War we have always just adopted new torture technique without any knowledge of its actual effectiveness.  Soon we will have absolute scientific proof as to which torture methods provide the most information for the effort exerted.

They say that the research will be guided by the US Army Field Manual. This means that all torture techniques researched  must not be specifically listed in the manual. I think this comes down to: Create new techniques and you are free to use them until the public finds out.

Interrogators will do ‘research’, not torture (Sidney Morning Herald)

US doing ‘scientific research’ to boost interrogations (AFP)

It is a commonly held misbelief that President Obama closed all of the US secret prisons abroad.  The ones that were closed are the “black” detention facilities that were operated by the CIA.  The prisons run by the US Justice Department are still up and running at full speed.

“The interrogators blindfolded him, taped his mouth shut and chained him to the ceiling, he alleges. Occasionally they unleashed a dog, which repeatedly bit him. At one point they removed the blindfold and forced him to kneel on a long wooden bar. “They tied my hands to a pulley [above] and pushed me back and forth as the bar rolled across my shins. I screamed and screamed.” They then pushed him to the ground and forced him to swallow twelve bottles of water. “Two people held my mouth open, and they poured water down my throat until my stomach was full and I became unconscious,” he said. “It was as if someone had inflated me.” After he was roused, he vomited uncontrollably.

This continued for a number of days. Sometimes he was hung upside down from the ceiling, other times he was blindfolded for extended periods. Eventually he was moved to Bagram, where the torture ceased. Four months later he was quietly released, with a letter of apology from US authorities for wrongfully imprisoning him.”

Anand Gopol on America’s Secret Afghan Prisons

Read more at: America’s Secret Afghan Prisons (The Nation)

Unnamed sources who spoke to Newsweek magazine said the Obama Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has concluded that John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who penned the infamous memos, used “poor judgment” but will not be subject to disciplinary action. Yoo and Bybee worked in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, along with Steven Bradbury, who is also named in the report.

The conclusions of the OPR report provide yet another demonstration of President Barack Obama’s defense of the anti-democratic and criminal practices of the Bush administration in the “war on terror,” and the current administration’s resolve that no one—especially those at the highest levels of government—will be held to account.

An earlier version of the OPR report completed in December 2008 concluded that Yoo, presently a University of California at Berkeley law professor, and Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge on the 9th Circuit, violated professional standards when they drafted an August 2002 legal opinion authorizing brutal methods by the CIA in the interrogation of suspected terrorist detainees.

US exonerates authors of Bush torture memos (wsws.org)

See Also: The Man Who Wrote The Book On Torture (Crapaganda.com)

As it turns out, retired CIA agent John Kiriakou has an active imagination, basically.

According to a piece by veteran intelligence reporter Jeff Stein, Kiriakou “basically made up” details about the waterboarding of al Qaeda agent Abu Zubaydah.

Arguing that waterboarding — or simulated drowning — is actually effective in forcing prisoners to share secret information, Kiriakou told ABC News’ Nightline in April, “The next day [after his first time being waterboarded], he told his interrogator that Allah had visited him in his cell during the night and told him to cooperate.”

“From that day on, he answered every question,” he said, according to ABC. “The threat information he provided disrupted a number of attacks, maybe dozens of attacks.”

“Now comes John Kiriakou, again, with a wholly different story,” Stein noted in Foreign Policy. “On the next-to-last page of a new memoir, The Reluctant Spy: My Secret Life in the CIA’s War on Terror (written with Michael Ruby), Kiriakou now rather off handedly admits that he basically made it all up.”

It seems, the CIA is not just making up stories for the American public.  They are creating propaganda for their own staff!

More at: Revealed: Retired CIA agent ‘made up’ waterboarding details (The Raw Story)

During his campaign for election, Barack Obama promised to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba. He said, on many occasions, that he would close Camp X-ray within the first year of his presidency.

His year is up!

After a year of “closing” the prison, 200 prisoners remain in the facility. Many of those, still in detention, have been there for eight years. 800 prisoners have been released so far. Of those let go, only one has been found guilty of any crime. He was convicted by a dubious military commission, a verdict that is likely to be overturned.

How does one survive in a detention facility for years? Ask Omar Deghayes.

“For nearly six years, British resident Omar Deghayes was imprisoned in Guantánamo and subjected to such brutal torture that he lost the sight in one eye. But far from being broken, he fought back to retain his dignity and his sanity.

Deghayes developed a personal policy of resistance. Guards would ­typically arrive at a prisoner’s cell and spray pepper and other chemicals through the “bean-hole”, the hatch in the door. While most prisoners cowered at the back of their cell, Deghayes says he would grab the guards’ hands and attack them. He fought back, as viciously as he could, trying to take the fights with guards out of the privacy of his cell and into the corridors.

“It was chaos; they would fall on top of each other and it was embarrassing [for them]. They were wearing all this heavy stuff [body armour] which didn’t help either,” he says. Some guards became afraid of going into his cell. Most, he says, were Puerto Rican and were not driven by the patriotism of the “war on terror”. They did not want to get hurt for their meagre wages.”

How I fought to survive Guantánamo (Guardian UK)

It has been one year since Barack Obama signed the executive order essentially outlawing torture, but the debate about interrogation methods continue.  Although the situation has improved, the changes were not as drastic as most Americans think. Elements of the US interrogation policy remain inhumane and counterproductive.

Americans can now boast that they no longer “torture” detainees, but they cannot say that detainees are not abused, or even that their treatment meets the minimum standards of humane treatment mandated by the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (the McCain amendment), US law, international law, or President Obama’s executive order.

If one were to visit one of the war zones today, as an a member of an Air Force interrogation team, they would still be allowed to abuse prisoners.

This is true even though in my experience, torture or even harsh but legal treatment never got us useful information. Instead, such tactics invariably did just the opposite, convincing detainees to clam up.

Matthew Alexander – Author of “How to Break a Terrorist.”

Read Matthew Alexander’s Op-Ed – Torture’s Loopholes (NY Times)

Afghan Boys Allegedly Abused At Bagram “Black Prison”

During the Bush Administration, the U.S. military had captured the number 3 man in Al-Qaeda.  The prisoner was “resistant to normal interrogation.”  So they approached  the CIA, The Justice Dept, and the White House  in order to see how much pressure could be exerted to obtain information.

John Yoo was the Deputy Assistant Attorney General.  He was tasked with writing the legal briefs that make it look like Constitutional law is flexible when it comes to the powers of the President.  He sends the interrogators away with exactly what they want to hear and now we have the President of the United States operating outside of the law.

They did get a fancy lawyer to write up a paper in Legaleeze before they shredded the Constitution, this time.

Watch the first of a three part interview with John Yoo on The Daily Show.

Part 2, Part 3

It has been argued that Yoo could potentially be indicted for crimes against the laws and customs of war, the crime of torture, and crimes against humanity. Criminal proceedings to this end have begun in Spain, in a move that could lead to an extradition request.

Crisis and Command: A History of Executive Power from George Washington to George W. Bush by John Yoo

Report Faults 2 Authors of Bush Terror Memos (NY Times)