Category Archives: human rights

Obama administration still operates under Bush torture memos

Gregg Levine writes: With today’s release of what is being shorthanded as the “torture report” (in reality, an executive summary less than one-tenth the size of the full classified document), America now has the printed consensus behind President Barack Obama’s August admission (for lack of a better word): “We tortured some folks.”

“While the Office of Legal Counsel found otherwise between 2002 and 2007, it is my personal conclusion that, under any common meaning of the term, CIA detainees were tortured,” said Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

But, as noted in today’s release, the Bush OLC knew they were doing legal gymnastics. White House lawyers specifically asked the Attorney General for “a formal declination of prosecution, in advance” for anyone the US oversaw who employed the techniques we now all understand to be torture. They knew in advance that the acts that were illegal, so they asked — in advance — for a blanket amnesty.

They knew it was illegal then, so what does that mean today?

As is implied by Feinstein’s use of those dates, and was likely inferred by most who heard the president this summer, the summary of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence torture report is looking backward (something Obama pooh-poohed in his earliest days in office), with the assumption that after 2007, or at least after the 2009 handover at the White House, everything changed.

But it is the reference to the OLC findings — in the summary and in Feinstein’s statement — that sort of strips the insulation off that convenient construct. [Continue reading…]

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The CIA’s torture report response

Micah Zenko writes: There will be a tremendous number of reactions to the graphic and troubling findings contained in the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) study’s executive study of the CIA’s detention and interrogation program. There will be far fewer reactions to the CIA response to the SSCI, in the form of a June 27, 2013, memo that the CIA released today. According to a forward from Director of Central Intelligence John Brennan, “The CIA’s comments on the Study were the result of a comprehensive and thorough review of the Study’s 20 conclusions and 20 case studies.” However, there is one CIA acknowledgment that should be as disturbing as anything that is contained within the SSCI study itself.

Page 24 of the CIA memo addresses the SSCI’s conclusion that the “CIA never conducted its own comprehensive analysis of the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.” The CIA’s response:

We agree with Conclusion 10 in full. It underpins the most important lesson that we have drawn from The Study: CIA needs to develop the structure, expertise, and methodologies required to more objectively and systematically evaluate the effectiveness of our covert actions.

We draw this lesson going forward fully aware of how difficult it can be to measure the impact of a particular action or set of actions on an outcome in a real-world setting.

Therefore, the CIA admitted that—as late as June 2013—it was simply incapable of evaluating the effectiveness of its covert activities. This apparently made it impossible for CIA officials and those within the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), who were responsible for detaining and interrogating the 119 known detainees, to examine and assess if this detention and interrogation program was working at all. [Continue reading…]

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CIA torture report may set off global prosecutions

Eli Lake and Josh Rogin write: The release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the CIA’s secret prisons roiled Washington Tuesday, but its real impact could be felt in courtrooms across the globe in the months and years to come.

Attorneys for human rights organizations are now poring over the 525-page declassified summary of the Senate majority report to find new material that could revive long-dormant and failed civil and criminal lawsuits on behalf of those detained by the Central Intelligence Agency.

While many American and international nongovernmental organizations have mounted legal challenges on behalf of people who were detained, transferred and harshly interrogated by the CIA and allied governments, these court challenges have rarely been successful. One reason is that the Justice Department under Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama have asserted that almost all details about the CIA program were a state secret. And while some government reports have been released about the black sites, the Senate committee’s majority report released Tuesday is the most comprehensive and detailed document to date. [Continue reading…]

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CIA paid torture instructors more than $80 million

NBC News reports: The CIA contractors who helped develop and operate the “enhanced interrogation techniques” that the agency used on terror suspects, including waterboarding, were paid more than $80 million, according to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s interrogation program released Tuesday.

The contract was for more than $180 million, but the contractors had only received $81 million when their contract was terminated in 2009.

Although the committee identified the contractors via pseudonyms, NBC News has previously identified them as Mitchell, Jessen & Associates, a Spokane, Washington, company run by two psychologists, Dr. John “Bruce” Jessen and Dr. James Mitchell, who had both previously worked with the U.S. Air Force. [Continue reading…]

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America can’t handle the truth – about Guantánamo, torture or a man now free from both

Cori Crider writes: He was wan, but he smiled. At a hospital here in Montevideo on Monday, my Guantánamo client Abu Wa’el Dhiab and I sat together for the first time without a shackle bolting him to the floor. My client grimaced in pain a lot – he has been on a hunger strike for the better part of the last two years, and it has gnawed at his spirit and his health. But he smiled: On Sunday, Abu Wa’el was finally released from the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, where he had been held for 12 years without ever being charged for a crime, despite the US government having cleared him in 2009.

As pale and thin as this man was, laying there in the hospital bed, a spark has returned to his eyes.

His ordeal may be over now, but there is much about Abu Wa’el’s health and mistreatment I still can’t tell you. The US military balked when I asked for the lab work it conducted just after our doctors saw him – the Pentagon would not so much as give me an official weight in those final days at Gitmo. Instead, the Defense Department moved up the date of his flight to Uruguay at the last minute, in an attempt to evade a damaging photo-op: an emaciated hunger-striker being carried off a US military plane. And in an ongoing court dispute, the Obama administration is still fighting a federal judge’s order to release video tapes showing the abusive force-feedings that Abu Wa’el suffered – over 10 unvarnished hours of his daily reality. [Continue reading…]

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Senate report on CIA use of torture

This is the declassified, redacted, 525-page Executive Summary of the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report which was approved for release two years ago but has not until today been made public.

The New York Times reports: A scathing report released by the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday found that the Central Intelligence Agency routinely misled the White House and Congress about the information it obtained from the detention and interrogation of terrorism suspects, and that its methods were more brutal than the C.I.A. acknowledged either to Bush administration officials or to the public.

The long-delayed report, which took five years to produce and is based on more than six million internal agency documents, is a sweeping indictment of the C.I.A.’s operation and oversight of a program carried out by agency officials and contractors in secret prisons around the world in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. It also provides a macabre accounting of some of the grisliest techniques that the C.I.A. used to torture and imprison terrorism suspects.

Detainees were deprived of sleep for as long as a week, and were sometimes told that they would be killed while in American custody. With the approval of the C.I.A.’s medical staff, some C.I.A. prisoners were subjected to medically unnecessary “rectal feeding” or “rectal hydration” — a technique that the C.I.A.’s chief of interrogations described as a way to exert “total control over the detainee.” C.I.A. medical staff members described the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the chief planner of the Sept. 11 attacks, as a “series of near drownings.”

The report also suggests that more prisoners were subjected to waterboarding than the three the C.I.A. has acknowledged in the past. The committee obtained a photograph of a waterboard surrounded by buckets of water at the prison in Afghanistan commonly known as the Salt Pit — a facility where the C.I.A. had claimed that waterboarding was never used. One clandestine officer described the prison as a “dungeon,” and another said that some prisoners there “literally looked like a dog that had been kenneled.” [Continue reading…]

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Dick Cheney was lying about torture

Mark Fallon writes: It’s official: torture doesn’t work. Waterboarding Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of 9/11, did not in fact “produce the intelligence that allowed us to get Osama bin Laden,” as former Vice President Dick Cheney asserted in 2011. Those are among the central findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation and detention after 9/11.

The report’s executive summary is expected to be released Tuesday. After reviewing thousands of the CIA’s own documents, the committee has concluded that torture was ineffective as an intelligence-gathering technique. Torture produced little information of value, and what little it did produce could’ve been gained through humane, legal methods that uphold American ideals.

I had long since come to that conclusion myself. As special agent in charge of the criminal investigation task force with investigators and intelligence personnel at Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan, and Iraq, I was privy to the information provided by Khalid Sheik Mohammed. I was aware of no valuable information that came from waterboarding. And the Senate Intelligence Committee—which had access to all CIA documents related to the “enhanced interrogation” program—has concluded that abusive techniques didn’t help the hunt for Bin Laden. Cheney’s claim that the frequent waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “produced phenomenal results for us” is simply false. [Continue reading…]

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UK and Israel supported Kenyan program of extrajudicial killings

Al Jazeera reports: Kenyan police have assassinated nearly 500 terrorism suspects as part of an extrajudicial killing program supported by intelligence provided by Israel and the United Kingdom, an Al Jazeera investigation has revealed.

Officers from four units of Kenya’s Anti-Terrorism Police Unit (ATPU) said that police assassinated terrorist suspects on government orders.

The police killings, according to an ATPU officer, were ordered by Kenya’s National Security Council and run into the hundreds every year. “Day in, day out, you hear of eliminating suspects,” the officer said.

“Since I was employed, I’ve killed over 50. Definitely, I do become proud because I’ve eliminated some problems,” added another officer.

The ATPU officers contend that Kenya’s weak judicial system had forced them to resort to assassinations, as police have failed to produce strong enough evidence to prosecute terrorism suspects. [Continue reading…]

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Why is Israel preventing human rights experts from entering Gaza?

Amira Hass reports: Israel prevented experts from Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch from entering the Gaza Strip during Operation Protective Edge, and it still is preventing them. As a result, no independent professionals (for example, a certain retired British military officer) have been able to check in real time the army’s claims and versions; for example, about weapons caches or firing near or from inside UN buildings.

If the Israel Defense Forces and its legal advisers were so sure they were adhering to international law, why were they scared to let these experts enter Gaza – alongside the many journalists who were allowed in?

It could very well be that every word in the IDF spokesman’s recent statement on the decision to investigate “exceptional incidents that occurred during Operation Protective Edge” is truthful. But these words – true or not – are just a veneer covering the problematic layers of Protective Edge and all Israeli military operations against the Palestinians.

The IDF, its lawyers and its commanders hold a monopoly on information from Israeli theaters of war because of the IDF’s technological superiority. So they also hold a monopoly on concealing information, telling untruths and dismissing the findings of Palestinian and Israeli human rights groups – and of course on ignoring Hamas’ claims. [Continue reading…]

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U.S. transfers six Guantánamo detainees to Uruguay

The New York Times reports: The United States transferred six detainees from the Guantánamo Bay prison to Uruguay this weekend, the Defense Department announced early Sunday. It was the largest single group of inmates to depart the wartime prison in Cuba since 2009, and the first detainees to be resettled in South America.

The transfer included a Syrian man who has been on a prolonged hunger strike to protest his indefinite detention without trial, and who has brought a high-profile lawsuit to challenge the military’s procedures for force-feeding him. His release may make most of that case moot, although a dispute over whether videotapes of the procedure must be disclosed to the public is expected to continue.

The transfer was also notable because the deal has been publicly known since it was finalized last spring. Significantly, however, delays by Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel in signing off on the arrangement placed it in jeopardy. Mr. Hagel’s slow pace this year in approving proposed transfers of low-level detainees contributed to larger tensions with the White House before his resignation under pressure last month. [Continue reading…]

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CIA won’t defend its one-time torturers

The Daily Beast reports: There may have been bourbon punch and festive lights at the CIA’s holiday party Friday night, but a frosty gloom hung in the air.

As everyone in the agency’s Langley, Va., headquarters knew, the long-awaited “torture report” from the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Democrats was set to drop early the next week, perhaps as soon as Monday morning. It seemed a rather awkward time for a party.

The CIA’s response to the report will be muted. The agency will neither defend the so-called rendition, detention, and interrogation programs. Nor will the CIA disavow those controversial efforts entirely. According to current and former officials familiar with the higher-ups’ thinking, CIA Director John Brennan is likely to keep his powder dry and essentially agree to disagree with the agency’s critics. Even though some CIA employees remain convinced that brutal interrogations of suspected terrorists, including waterboarding, produced useful information that helped prevent terrorist attacks, the agency’s leaders will take no position on whether that information could have been obtained through less coercive means.

Such a Jesuitical response will do absolutely nothing to satisfy critics of the program or its supporters — some of whom still go work at Langley every day. But it’s the result of the precarious political position that Brennan finds himself in now. [Continue reading…]

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Obama administration again tries to block release of CIA torture report

The New York Times reports: The Senate Intelligence Committee on Friday faced a new obstacle in its efforts to make public its report on the torture of prisoners once held by the Central Intelligence Agency after last-minute warnings from the Obama administration that the report’s release could ignite new unrest in the Middle East and put American hostages at risk.

The warnings were delivered on Friday during a phone call between Secretary of State John Kerry and Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who leads the committee. According to congressional officials, Mr. Kerry warned that allies were concerned that the report could incite violence in the Middle East.

Ms. Feinstein had planned to make the report public next week, but it is uncertain whether the call from Mr. Kerry would affect that timetable.

The exchange between Mr. Kerry and Ms. Feinstein is just the latest turn in the protracted dispute over the Intelligence Committee’s investigation into the detention and interrogation of C.I.A. prisoners during the Bush administration, an investigation that set out to examine the efficacy of the brutal interrogation methods. [Continue reading…]

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Inside the battle over the CIA torture report

Josh Rogin and Eli Lake write: After months of internal wrangling, the Senate Intelligence Committee is finally set to release its report on President George W. Bush-era CIA practices, which among other details will contain information about foreign countries that aided in the secret detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Several U.S. officials told us that the negotiations are nearly complete between the Central Intelligence Agency and the committee’s Democratic staff, which prepared the classified 6,300-page report and its 600-page, soon-to-be-released declassified executive summary. Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s chairman, is set to release the summary early next week. Her staff members had objected vigorously to hundreds of redactions the CIA had proposed in the executive summary. After an often-contentious process to resolve the disputes, managed by top White House officials, Feinstein was able to roll back the majority of the disputed CIA redactions.

Among the most significant of Feinstein’s victories, the report will retain information on countries that aided the CIA program by hosting black sites or otherwise participating in the secret rendition of suspected terrorists. The countries will not be identified by name, but in other ways, such as code names like “Country A.” This falls short of Feinstein’s original desire, which was to name the countries explicitly, but represents a big victory for the committee nonetheless. [Continue reading…]

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Mexico’s missing students draw attention to 20,000 ‘vanished’ others

The Guardian reports: They found the first grave in a thicket of spiny huisache trees clinging to the hillside outside the town of Iguala.

Under a pounding midday sun, about a dozen men and women watched as an older man plunged a pickaxe into the heavy soil. Some offered advice on where and how to dig; mostly they looked on in silence

When he turned up a human femur, Mayra Vergara turned her back and broke into silent tears. She had hoped that today she might find some clue to the fate of her brother Tomás, a taxi driver who was kidnapped in July 2012, never to be seen again. But whoever lay in the shallow grave, she said, they deserved more than this.

“Even if it isn’t my brother in there, it is still a person. A person who deserved a proper burial,” she said, her face contorted in anger and grief. “And the question is when? When are they going to do something for us?”

The disappearance and probable massacre of 43 student teachers after they were attacked and arrested by Iguala’s municipal police two months ago has focused world attention on the horror of Mexico’s drug violence – and the official corruption that allows much of it to happen.

A wave of protests triggered by the massacre put President Enrique Peña Nieto under acute political pressure.

But the incident has also lifted the lid on the open secret of Mexico’s many other disappeared: amid the drug-fuelled violence of recent years, some 20,000 people have simply vanished. [Continue reading…]

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Highest-value terror detainees excluded from Senate investigation of CIA torture

The Guardian reports: A widely anticipated report by the Senate intelligence committee into torture committed by the Central Intelligence Agency has a hole at the center of its story: the men the CIA tortured.

Lawyers for four of the highest-value detainees ever held by the CIA, all of whom have made credible allegations of torture and all of whom remain in US government custody, say the Senate committee never spoke with their clients. In some cases the Senate’s investigators never attempted to speak with the men whose abuse is at the heart of what the committee spent over four years investigating.

The absence of the torture victims’ accounts calls the thoroughness of the Senate committee inquiry “directly into question”, said David Nevin, who represents accused 9/11 architect Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

“If you’re conducting a genuine inquiry of a program that tortured people, don’t you begin by talking to the people who were tortured? It seems here, as far as my client is concerned, no effort was made to do that.” [Continue reading…]

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How Israel teaches its citizens all the wrong lessons

William Saletan writes: Across Israel, anger at Arabs is building. In the wake of a horrific Palestinian terrorist attack on a Jerusalem synagogue — and concurrent with violent protests by Palestinians — several assaults by Jews against Arabs have been reported. Arab workers are reporting a rise in job discrimination. In a poll published Thursday, 58 percent of Jews endorsed a decision by the mayor of Ashkelon, a major city, to bar Arab citizens of Israel from working near young schoolchildren.

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, says these discriminatory outbursts and policies are wrong. “We must not generalize about an entire public due to a small and violent minority,” he asserts. But Netanyahu teaches this kind of prejudice every day, by demolishing the homes of the families of suspected terrorists.

Israel has employed this policy, off and on, for decades. It’s rooted in old military laws and based on the idea that it deters prospective terrorists. The government doesn’t have to show that the family members who live in the house — grandparents, children, cousins — are guilty or even suspected of any crime. And the policy applies only to Arabs, not to Jews.

The first lesson this policy teaches Israelis is that it’s legitimate to inflict suffering on innocent people in order to discourage terrorism. [Continue reading…]

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White House sides with CIA in effort to shield torturers

The New York Times reports: In a tense confrontation with President Obama’s closest adviser on Thursday, a group of Senate Democrats accused the White House of trying to censor significant details in a voluminous report on the use of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency.

During a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill with Denis R. McDonough, the White House chief of staff, the senators said that the White House was siding with the C.I.A. and trying to thwart negotiations over the report’s release. The negotiations have dragged on for months because of a dispute over the C.I.A.’s demand that pseudonyms of agency officers be deleted from the report.

The C.I.A., supported by the White House, has argued that even without using the real names of the officers, their identities could still be revealed.

According to several people in attendance, the meeting was civil, but neither side gave ground, and it ended without resolution. The Senate Intelligence Committee spent five years working on the 6,000-page report, which is said to provide grim details about the torture of detainees in C.I.A. prisons during the Bush administration, and describe a persistent effort by C.I.A. officials to mislead the White House and Congress about the efficacy of its interrogation techniques. The committee voted this year to declassify the report’s executive summary, numbering several hundred pages, but the fight over redactions has delayed the release.

The confrontation on Thursday was a sign that Senate Democrats are worried that whatever leverage they have in having the report declassified on their terms is dwindling. Republicans will take control of the Senate in January, and the Intelligence Committee’s new leadership could choose to drag out the report’s release even longer. Most Republican members of the committee have long been opposed to the investigation — which they have said is a partisan attempt to discredit the Bush administration — although several committee Republicans voted in favor of declassifying the report’s executive summary.

With their time in power running out, some Democrats have suggested that they might take the extreme step of bypassing the executive branch and declassifying the report themselves. One option would be to use an arcane Senate procedure to release the report, and another would be to use the Constitution’s “speech or debate clause” to read it into the record from the Senate floor — an echo of 1971, when Senator Mike Gravel of Alaska read parts of the Pentagon Papers aloud in a Senate committee hearing.

Senator Mark Udall of Colorado, a Democratic member of the Intelligence Committee who recently lost a bid for re-election, suggested recently he might resort to this tactic. [Continue reading…]

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Almost 36 million people live in modern slavery

BBC News reports: Nearly 36 million people worldwide, or 0.5% of the world’s population, live as slaves, a survey by anti-slavery campaign group Walk Free says.

The group’s Global Slavery Index says India has the most slaves overall and Mauritania has the highest percentage.

The total is 20% higher than for 2013 because of better methodology.

The report defines slaves as people subject to forced labour, debt bondage, trafficking, sexual exploitation for money and forced or servile marriage.

It uses slavery in a modern sense of the term, rather than as a reference to the broadly outlawed traditional practice where people were held in bondage and treated as another person’s property.

The Global Slavery Index’s estimate is higher than other attempts to quantify modern slavery. In 2012, the International Labour Organisation estimated that almost 21 million people were victims of forced labour. [Continue reading…]

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