Category Archives: extrajudicial detention

A window into CIA’s embrace of secret jails

A window into CIA’s embrace of secret jails
By David Johnston and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, August 13, 2009

In March 2003, two C.I.A. officials surprised Kyle D. Foggo, then the chief of the agency’s main European supply base, with an unusual request. They wanted his help building secret prisons to hold some of the world’s most threatening terrorists.

Mr. Foggo, nicknamed Dusty, was known inside the agency as a cigar-waving, bourbon-drinking operator, someone who could get a cargo plane flying anywhere in the world or quickly obtain weapons, food, money — whatever the C.I.A. needed. His unit in Frankfurt, Germany, was strained by the spy agency’s operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, but Mr. Foggo agreed to the assignment.

“It was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters,” he said in an interview. “I was proud to help my nation.”

With that, Mr. Foggo went on to oversee construction of three detention centers, each built to house about a half-dozen detainees, according to former intelligence officials and others briefed on the matter. One jail was a renovated building on a busy street in Bucharest, Romania, the officials disclosed. Another was a steel-beam structure at a remote site in Morocco that was apparently never used. The third, another remodeling project, was outside another former Eastern bloc city. They were designed to appear identical, so prisoners would be disoriented and not know where they were if they were shuttled back and forth. They were kept in isolated cells. [continued…]

Interrogator: ‘intolerance’ led to torture
By Jeff Stein, CQ, August 11, 2009

Former Air Force Maj. Matthew Alexander, whose questioning of a captured terrorist led to the elimination al Qaeda’s top man in Iraq, said a pervasive “intolerance” of Arabs and Muslims among American interrogators led to abuses at Abu Ghraib and other prisons.

“Soldiers referred to them as rag heads and so on,” Alexander said during a Monday talk at the International Spy Museum, in Washington, D.C. to promote his book, “How To Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.”

“They had read things like ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam,’ which characterizes its practitioners as potential terrorists, he added.

An Air Force criminal investigator for over a decade before being assigned to Iraq in March 2006, Alexander was careful not to characterize all, or even most, interrogators as bigots, although he said, “it was not just a few bad apples” who tortured prisoners.

“It was not a majority of interrogators. If I had to guess, maybe 20 per cent,” he told a packed room at the International Spy Museum, which opened its doors in July 2002.

“A small minority with a lot of power” at the top of the chain of command was responsible for fostering at atmosphere in which abuses could flourish, he said. [continued…]

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Obama officials to tour Michigan prison

Obama officials to tour Michigan prison
By Tim Martin, AP, August 13, 2009

Obama administration officials plan on Thursday to tour a soon-to-be-shuttered Michigan state prison considered an option to hold terrorism suspects now detained at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

Two government officials said representatives of the Defense, Justice and Homeland Security departments would visit a state prison in Standish. The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly about the visit.

An Obama administration official said the visit was intended to gather information about the facility and no decisions had been made about where to move the detainees. Multiple options are being considered, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions. [continued…]

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Obama faces court test over detainee

Obama faces court test over detainee
By William Glaberson, New York Times, July 29, 2009

The fate of one of the youngest detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison is emerging as a major test of whether the courts or the president has the final authority over when prisoners there are released.

After a federal judge said earlier this month that the government’s case for holding the detainee, Mohammed Jawad, was “riddled with holes,” the Obama administration conceded defeat and agreed that Mr. Jawad would no longer be considered a military detainee. But the administration said it would still hold him at the prison in Cuba for possible prosecution in the United States.

On Tuesday, Mr. Jawad’s lawyers attacked that position, arguing that the government had given up any authority to hold him. “Enough is enough,” the lawyers said in legal papers that urged the judge, Ellen Segal Huvelle, to send him back to Afghanistan, which has requested his return. [continued…]

Arrests in terror case bewilder associates
By Campbell Robertson, New York Times, July 29, 2009

Daniel Boyd was a man of rare conviction for these parts.

Rare because he and his family were Muslims in this quiet rural subdivision where the denominations generally run from Baptist to Presbyterian. But also rare for his intensity.

“How many Christians you see standing in the yard praying five times a day?” asked Jeremy Kuhn, 20, who lives across the street. “They just believed more than anyone else.”

But to the disbelief of Mr. Kuhn, the federal authorities say Mr. Boyd and two of his sons took their convictions beyond religious faith and into terrorism. They were among seven men charged on Monday with supporting violent jihad movements in countries including Israel, Jordan, Kosovo and Pakistan. An eighth man was still being sought, said a spokeswoman for federal prosecutors in Raleigh, about 20 miles north of here.

The men are charged with stockpiling automatic weapons and traveling abroad numerous times to participate in jihadist movements. There is no indication in the indictment that they were planning attacks in the United States, though prosecutors said they had practiced military tactics this summer in a rural county close to Virginia. [continued…]

Britain’s own Guantánamo
By David Vine, The Guardian, July 28, 2009

Piece by piece, the truth is finally coming out about Britain’s own Guantánamo Bay – Diego Garcia. Today the human rights lawyers group Reprieve began a legal case on behalf of Saad Iqbal Madni, who they say was transited through the UK-controlled Indian Ocean island as part of the CIA’s secret rendition programme.

Madni, whom Reprieve says was tortured in Egypt, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay after his stopover in Diego Garcia, has been released in Pakistan where – according to Clive Stafford Smith, the Reprieve director – he is “effectively crippled by his torture”.

For more than six years following the declaration of a war on terror in 2001, British and US officials adamantly rejected the existence of a rendition facility or secret CIA prison on the island, the site of a major British-American military base since the 1970s and long off-limits to civilians, reporters, and investigators. Dismissing reports about detainees on the atoll as “totally without foundation”, Britain’s then foreign secretary, Jack Straw, asserted: “United States authorities have repeatedly assured us that no detainees have at any time passed in transit through Diego Garcia or its territorial waters or have disembarked there.”

However, allegations kept accumulating. [continued…]

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NEWS: Bagram – the other Gitmo

Bagram: The other Gitmo
By William Fisher, Asia Times, January 16, 2008

As last week marked the sixth anniversary of the arrival of the first orange-jumpsuit-clad prisoners at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, human-rights organizations are attempting to focus public and congressional scrutiny on what some are calling “the other Gitmo”.

This is a prison located on the US military base in the ancient city of Bagram near Charikar in Parvan, Afghanistan. The detention center was set up by the US military as a temporary screening site after the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan overthrew the Taliban. It currently houses about 630 prisoners – close to three times as many as are still held at Guantanamo.

In 2005, following well-documented accounts of detainee deaths, torture and “disappeared” prisoners, the US undertook efforts to turn the facility over to the Afghan government. But, thanks to a series of legal, bureaucratic and administrative missteps, the prison is still under American military control. And a recent confidential report from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has reportedly complained about the continued mistreatment of prisoners.

The ICRC report is said to cite massive overcrowding, “harsh” conditions, lack of clarity about the legal basis for detention, prisoners held “incommunicado” in “a previously undisclosed warren of isolation cells”, and “sometimes subjected to cruel treatment in violation of the Geneva Conventions”. Some prisoners have been held without charges or lawyers for more than five years. The Red Cross said dozens of prisoners have been held incommunicado for weeks or even months, hidden from prison inspectors. [complete article]

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NEWS & REVIEW: Taxi to the Dark Side

The power of authority: a dark tale
By Adam Liptak, New York Times, January 1, 2008

Frank Gibney was old and sick and a little more than a month away from dying. But he was filled with righteous anger, and he had some things to say. He told his son, the documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, to unplug a noisy oxygen machine and to grab a video camera.

The older Mr. Gibney, a journalist and scholar who died in April, had served as a naval interrogator in World War II. In a moving statement that serves as a sort of coda to “Taxi to the Dark Side,” a new documentary about the Bush administration’s interrogation policies in the post-9/11 world, he said it had never occurred to him to use brutal techniques on the Japanese prisoners in his custody.

“We had the sense that we were on the side of the good guys,” Frank Gibney said, seething. “People would get decent treatment. And there was the rule of law.”

There would seem to be an enormous distance between the Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where the central events in “Taxi to the Dark Side” take place, and Enron’s headquarters in Houston, where the machinations of white-collar criminals brought down the giant energy company and became the backdrop for Mr. Gibney’s entertaining 2005 documentary, “Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.” But Mr. Gibney said the two projects have common themes.

“The subject of corruption unites my films,” he said. “‘Enron’ was about economic corruption, and ‘Taxi’ is about the corruption of the rule of law.” [complete article]

Padilla sues John Yoo over detention
By Adam Liptak, New York Times, January , 2008

Jose Padilla, the American citizen who was held in military detention for more than three years as an enemy combatant, filed a lawsuit Friday against a former Justice Department lawyer who helped provide the legal justifications for what the suit says was Mr. Padilla’s unconstitutional confinement and “gross physical and psychological abuse.”

The lawyer, John C. Yoo, now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, wrote or helped prepare a series of legal memorandums on interrogations and the treatment of detainees after the Sept. 11 attacks. [complete article]

Foiling U.S. plan, prison expands in Afghanistan
By Tim Golden, New York Times, January 7, 2008

As the Bush administration struggles for a way to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a similar effort to scale down a larger and more secretive American detention center in Afghanistan has been beset by political, legal and security problems, officials say.

The American detention center, established at the Bagram military base as a temporary screening site after the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, is now teeming with some 630 prisoners — more than twice the 275 being held at Guantanamo. [complete article]

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NEWS, OPINION & EDITOR’S COMMENT: America has abandoned the rule of law

Jordan’s spy agency: holding cell for the CIA
By Craig Whitlock, Washington Post, December 1, 2007

Over the past seven years, an imposing building on the outskirts of this city has served as a secret holding cell for the CIA.

The building is the headquarters of the General Intelligence Department, Jordan’s powerful spy and security agency. Since 2000, at the CIA’s behest, at least 12 non-Jordanian terrorism suspects have been detained and interrogated here, according to documents and former prisoners, human rights advocates, defense lawyers and former U.S. officials.
[…]
Bush administration officials have said they do not hand over terrorism suspects to countries that are likely to abuse them. For several years, however, the State Department has cited widespread allegations of torture by Jordan’s security agencies in its annual report cards on human rights.

Independent monitors have become increasingly critical of Jordan’s record. Since 2006, the United Nations, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have issued reports on abuses in Jordan, often singling out the General Intelligence Department.

Former prisoners have reported that their captors were expert in two practices in particular: falaqa, or beating suspects on the soles of their feet with a truncheon and then, often, forcing them to walk barefoot and bloodied across a salt-covered floor; and farruj, or the “grilled chicken,” in which prisoners are handcuffed behind their legs, hung upside down by a rod placed behind their knees, and beaten. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The White House has a page on its web site devoted to “Tales of Saddam’s Brutality.” There it refers to falaqa as Uday Hussein’s “favourite punishment.”

U.S. says it has right to kidnap British citizens
By David Leppard, The Sunday Times, December 2, 2007

America has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it.

The admission will alarm the British business community after the case of the so-called NatWest Three, bankers who were extradited to America on fraud charges. More than a dozen other British executives, including senior managers at British Airways and BAE Systems, are under investigation by the US authorities and could face criminal charges in America. [complete article]

The torture compromise of 2007
By David Bromwich, Huffington Post, November 29, 2007

A friend at a dinner party on the East coast found herself in an argument in which she was the only person opposed to torture. The other invitees, all graduates of favored preparatory schools and Ivy League colleges, worked in the law, investment banking, urban planning and the arts. They agreed that President Bush was incompetent and untrustworthy; but his fundamental mistake about torture had been to go after the law. Torture, they said, cannot be a policy, and a law that permits torture cannot be on the books. What is wanted is a leader who will break the law selectively, in a way we can trust. Torture should be allowable, but only by the right people and for the right reason. To a man and woman, the guests who held this view were supporters of Hillary Clinton. [complete article]

The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act
By Philip Giraldi, Huffington Post, November 26, 2007

There has been a long tradition of fear-mongering legislation in the United States directed against groups and individuals believed to threaten the established order. The first such measures were the Alien and Sedition Acts passed by Congress in 1798 during the administration of the second president of the United States John Adams. The Acts, consisting of four separate laws, made it more difficult to become a citizen, sought to control real or imagined foreign agents operating in the United States, and also gave the government broad powers to control “sedition.” Sedition was defined as “resisting any law of the United States or any act of the President” punishable by a prison sentence of up to two years. It also made illegal “false, scandalous or malicious writing” directed against either the government or government officials. The next President, Thomas Jefferson declared that three out of the four laws were unconstitutional and pardoned everyone who had been convicted under them. [complete article]

Witness names to be withheld from detainee
By William Glaberson, New York Times, December 1, 2007

Defense lawyers preparing for the war crimes trial of a 21-year-old Guantánamo detainee have been ordered by a military judge not to tell their client — or anyone else — the identity of witnesses against him, newly released documents show.

The case of the detainee, Omar Ahmed Khadr, is being closely watched because it may be the first Guantánamo prosecution to go to trial, perhaps as soon as May.

Defense lawyers say military prosecutors have sought similar orders to keep the names of witnesses secret in other military commission cases, which have been a centerpiece of the Bush administration’s policies for detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Some legal experts and defense lawyers said the judge’s order, issued on Oct. 15 without public disclosure, underscored the gap between military commission procedures and traditional American rules that the accused has a right to a public trial and to confront the witnesses against him. [complete article]

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REVIEW & OPINION: The torture presidency

The man behind the torture
By David Cole, New York Review of Books, December 6, 2007

Perhaps the most powerful lawyer in the Bush administration is also the most reclusive. David Addington, who was Vice President Dick Cheney’s counsel from 2001 to 2005, and since then his chief of staff, does not talk to the press. His voice, however, has been enormously influential behind closed doors, where, with Cheney’s backing, he has helped shape the administration’s strategy in the war on terror, and in particular its aggressively expansive conception of executive power. Sometimes called “Cheney’s Cheney,” Addington has twenty years of experience in national security matters—he has been a lawyer for the CIA, the secretary of defense, and two congressional committees concerned with intelligence and foreign affairs. He is a prodigious worker, and by all accounts a brilliant inside political player. Richard Shiffrin, deputy general counsel for intelligence at the Defense Department until 2003, called him “an unopposable force.” Yet most of the American public has never heard him speak.

Addington’s combination of public silence and private power makes him an apt symbol for the Bush administration’s general approach to national security. Many of the administration’s most controversial policies have been adopted in secret, under Addington’s direction, often without much input from other parts of the executive branch, much less other branches of government, and without public accountability. Among the measures we know about are disappearances of detainees into secret CIA prisons, the use of torture to gather evidence, rendition of suspects to countries known for torture, and warrantless wiretapping of Americans. [complete article]

The missing IG report on Maher Arar
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, November 16, 2007

Of all the Bush Administration’s many perversions of the justice system, there is something particularly distressing about the case of Maher Arar. A Canadian software engineer, he was changing planes in JFK on his way home to Canada after a Mediterranean vacation when American law enforcement snatched him up. Arar had been fingered as a terrorism suspect by Canadian authorities. Within a brief period of time, he was interrogated, locked-up and then bundled off to Jordan with directions for transshipment to Syria, a nation known to use torture. Indeed, it was plain from the outset that he was shipped to Syria for purposes of being tortured, with a list of questions to be put to him passed along. Never mind that Syria is constantly reviled as a brutal dictatorship by some Bush Administration figures who openly dream of bombing or invading it… the Syrians, it seems, have a redeeming feature—their willingness to torture the occasional Canadian engineer as a gesture of friendship to the Americans. [complete article]

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NEWS: Secret CIA jail for terror suspects on British island

Claims of secret CIA jail for terror suspects on British island to be investigated
By Ian Cobain and Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, October 19, 2007

Allegations that the CIA held al-Qaida suspects for interrogation at a secret prison on sovereign British territory are to be investigated by MPs, the Guardian has learned. The all-party foreign affairs committee is to examine long-standing suspicions that the agency has operated one of its so-called “black site” prisons on Diego Garcia, the British overseas territory in the Indian Ocean that is home to a large US military base.

Lawyers from Reprieve, a legal charity that represents a number of detainees at Guantánamo Bay, including several former British residents, are calling on the committee to question US and British officials about the allegations. According to the organisation’s submission to the committee, the UK government is “potentially systematically complicit in the most serious crimes against humanity of disappearance, torture and prolonged incommunicado detention”.

Clive Stafford Smith, the charity’s legal director, said he was “absolutely and categorically certain” that prisoners have been held on the island. “If the foreign affairs committee approaches this thoroughly, they will get to the bottom of it,” he said. [complete article]

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NEWS: U.S. kidnaps another Iranian

Kurds denounce U.S. detention of Iranian
By Jay Price and Yaseen Taha, McClatchy, September 20, 2007

U.S. troops arrested an Iranian man during an early morning raid on a hotel in this northern Iraqi city Thursday and accused him of helping to smuggle a deadly type of roadside bomb into Iraq.

But the Kurdistan Regional Government in a statement called the arrest “illegitimate,” said the man was a member of a trade delegation that had been invited to Sulaimaniyah by the local government and demanded that he be released.

“Actions like these serve no one,” the statement said.

The United States has detained several Iranians in Iraq in the past year and accused them of training Iraqi insurgents and providing weapons to them. In January it took five Iranians into custody in Irbil, the Kurdish regional capital, and accused them of being members of the Iranian military. They’re still being held. Eight other Iranians who were detained last month in Baghdad were quickly released, however. [complete article]

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