Category Archives: human rights

The CIA: a continuing threat to U.S. persons or interests?

The Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair reassured the House Intelligence Committee yesterday that he understands that killing Americans is a “very sensitive issue” and that the agency must always “get specific permission” to do so.

I wonder how much comfort that provides to the family of Jim and Veronica “Roni” Bowers and their two children, six-year-old son Cory and infant daughter Charity, who under the CIA’s watch were shot down by the Peruvian Air Force while flying over Peru in 2001. Veronica Bowers and her daughter Charity were killed. The video below shows what happened:

ABC News reports:

…for almost nine years, the CIA misled Congress, the White House and the dead woman’s parents about how and why the agency defied the rules established to make sure innocent people were not killed.

“I want to know the truth,” Garnett Luttig, father of Roni Bowers, told ABC News. “I want to know why. I wonder why my baby’s gone. Don’t they understand that?”

Said Gloria Luttig, Roni’s mother, “I want somebody to have to stand up and say I was responsible. I want him to know what a mother’s heart is like.”

On Wednesday, the CIA said its nine-year long investigation had determined that 16 CIA employees should be disciplined, including the woman then in charge of counter-narcotics.

Many of them are no longer with the CIA, and one of those involved said his discipline was no more than a letter of reprimand placed in his file, which he was told would be removed in one year.

So what are we to understand from DNI Blair? That while the CIA engages in extrajudicial killings, it does so with great caution but if mistakes are made, those responsible certainly face the risk of receiving a letter of reprimand?

Either we live in a land governed by law or we don’t. A determination by an intelligence operative is by no stretch of the imagination a substitute for due process.

Facebooktwittermail

Obama’s secret prisons

Obama’s secret prisons
By Anand Gopal, TomDispatch, January 28, 2010

One quiet, wintry night last year in the eastern Afghan town of Khost, a young government employee named Ismatullah simply vanished. He had last been seen in the town’s bazaar with a group of friends. Family members scoured Khost’s dust-doused streets for days. Village elders contacted Taliban commanders in the area who were wont to kidnap government workers, but they had never heard of the young man. Even the governor got involved, ordering his police to round up nettlesome criminal gangs that sometimes preyed on young bazaar-goers for ransom.

But the hunt turned up nothing. Spring and summer came and went with no sign of Ismatullah. Then one day, long after the police and village elders had abandoned their search, a courier delivered a neat, handwritten note on Red Cross stationary to the family. In it, Ismatullah informed them that he was in Bagram, an American prison more than 200 miles away. U.S. forces had picked him up while he was on his way home from the bazaar, the terse letter stated, and he didn’t know when he would be freed.

Sometime in the last few years, Pashtun villagers in Afghanistan’s rugged heartland began to lose faith in the American project. Many of them can point to the precise moment of this transformation, and it usually took place in the dead of the night, when most of the country was fast asleep. In the secretive U.S. detentions process, suspects are usually nabbed in the darkness and then sent to one of a number of detention areas on military bases, often on the slightest suspicion and without the knowledge of their families.

This process has become even more feared and hated in Afghanistan than coalition airstrikes. The night raids and detentions, little known or understood outside of these Pashtun villages, are slowly turning Afghans against the very forces they greeted as liberators just a few years ago. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. mulls legality of killing American al Qaeda “turncoat”

U.S. mulls legality of killing American al Qaeda “turncoat”
By Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito and Brian Ross, ABC News, January 25, 2010

White House lawyers are mulling the legality of proposed attempts to kill an American citizen, Anwar al Awlaki, who is believed to be part of the leadership of the al Qaeda group in Yemen behind a series of terror strikes, according to two people briefed by U.S. intelligence officials.

One of the people briefed said opportunities to “take out” Awlaki “may have been missed” because of the legal questions surrounding a lethal attack which would specifically target an American citizen. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — I’m not a lawyer, but isn’t this the way it works? If someone has an Arabic name, then citizenship is secondary. So long as they are “taken out” overseas, preferably in a state or area with a reputation for lawlessness, then legal process fits comfortably into the tip of a Hellfire missile. Extra latitude is of course provided when the “target” is not white.

But maybe the Justice Department could provide a little extra clarity — some new designations in citizenship status just so everyone understands which American citizens can be executed on the basis of a presidential order and which can’t. As for non-Americans, well, America has always reserved the right to kill them as and when it sees fit.

The drone surge
By Nick Turse, TomDispatch, January 24, 2010

One moment there was the hum of a motor in the sky above. The next, on a recent morning in Afghanistan’s Helmand province, a missile blasted a home, killing 13 people. Days later, the same increasingly familiar mechanical whine preceded a two-missile salvo that slammed into a compound in Degan village in the tribal North Waziristan district of Pakistan, killing three.

What were once unacknowledged, relatively infrequent targeted killings of suspected militants or terrorists in the Bush years have become commonplace under the Obama administration. And since a devastating December 30th suicide attack by a Jordanian double agent on a CIA forward operating base in Afghanistan, unmanned aerial drones have been hunting humans in the Af-Pak war zone at a record pace. In Pakistan, an “unprecedented number” of strikes — which have killed armed guerrillas and civilians alike — have led to more fear, anger, and outrage in the tribal areas, as the CIA, with help from the U.S. Air Force, wages the most public “secret” war of modern times.

In neighboring Afghanistan, unmanned aircraft, for years in short supply and tasked primarily with surveillance missions, have increasingly been used to assassinate suspected militants as part of an aerial surge that has significantly outpaced the highly publicized “surge” of ground forces now underway. And yet, unprecedented as it may be in size and scope, the present ramping up of the drone war is only the opening salvo in a planned 40-year Pentagon surge to create fleets of ultra-advanced, heavily-armed, increasingly autonomous, all-seeing, hypersonic unmanned aerial systems (UAS). [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Detainees will still be held, but not tried, official says

Detainees will still be held, but not tried, official says
By Charlie Savage, New York Times, January 22, 2010

The Obama administration has decided to continue to imprison without trials nearly 50 detainees at the Guantánamo Bay military prison in Cuba because a high-level task force has concluded that they are too difficult to prosecute but too dangerous to release, an administration official said on Thursday.

However, the administration has decided that nearly 40 other detainees should be prosecuted for terrorism or related war crimes. And the remaining prisoners, about 110 men, should be repatriated or transferred to other countries for possible release, the official said, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak about the numbers.

There are just under 200 detainees left at the detention center.

President Obama established the task force shortly after his inauguration last year as part of his administration’s effort to deal with the detainee issues left behind by the Bush administration. It was facing a deadline of Friday to complete its work. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

The official response begins

The official response begins
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, January 19, 2010

When a cover-up is exposed, nothing is more telling than the first reactions from those who are involved. Do they maintain their stories and face potentially aggravated consequences? Or do they simply remain silent? In making this choice, they often telegraph the depth of their anxiety and concern.

Last night on MSNBC’s Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I focused on the first responses to “The Guantánamo ‘Suicides.’” Colonel Michael Bumgarner, the former commander at Camp America, had sent an email to the Associated Press, the text of which AP confirmed to me, in which he said he would have to get clearance from the Defense Department to speak, but then stated:

This blatant misrepresentation of the truth infuriates me. I don’t know who Sgt. Hickman is, but he is only trying to be a spotlight ranger. He knows nothing about what transpired in Camp 1, or our medical facility. I do, I was there.

This statement merits closer inspection. The first sentence is a classic nondenial denial. It appears on the surface to deny part of the account, but in fact denies nothing. Bumgarner needs to state specifically what allegations he considers inaccurate. His failure to do so is telling. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

The crime of not “looking backward”

The crime of not “looking backward”
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, January 19, 2010

The single biggest lie in War on Terror revisionist history is that our torture was confined only to a handful of “high-value” prisoners. New credible reports of torture continuously emerge. That’s because America implemented and maintained a systematic torture regime spread throughout our worldwide, due-process-free detention system. There have been at least 100 deaths of detainees in American custody who died during or as the result of interrogation. Gen. Barry McCaffrey said: “We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.” Gen. Antonio Taguba said after investigating the Abu Ghraib abuses and finding they were part and parcel of official policy sanctioned at the highest levels of the U.S. Government, and not the acts of a few “rogue” agents: “there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Despite all of this, our media persists in sustaining the lie that the torture controversy is about three cases of waterboarding and a few “high-value” detainees who were treated a bit harshly. That’s why Horton’s story received so little attention and was almost completely ignored by right-wing commentators: because it shatters the central myth that torture was used only in the most extreme cases — virtual Ticking Time Bomb scenarios — when there was simply no other choice. Leading American media outlets, as a matter of policy, won’t even use the word “torture.” This, despite the fact that the abuse was so brutal and inhumane that it led to the deaths of helpless captives — including run-of-the-mill detainees, almost certainly ones guilty of absolutely nothing — in numerous cases. These three detainee deaths — like so many other similar cases — illustrate how extreme is the myth that has taken root in order to obscure what was really done. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

The Guantánamo “suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle

The Guantánamo “suicides”: A Camp Delta sergeant blows the whistle
By Scott Horton, Harper’s, January 18, 2010

When President Barack Obama took office last year, he promised to “restore the standards of due process and the core constitutional values that have made this country great.” Toward that end, the president issued an executive order declaring that the extra-constitutional prison camp at Guantánamo “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.” Obama has failed to fulfill his promise. Some prisoners are being charged with crimes, others released, but the date for closing the camp seems to recede steadily into the future. Furthermore, new evidence now emerging may entangle Obama’s young administration with crimes that occurred during the Bush presidency, evidence that suggests the current administration failed to investigate seriously—and may even have continued—a cover-up of the possible homicides of three prisoners at Guantánamo in 2006.

Late in the evening on June 9 that year, three prisoners at Guantánamo died suddenly and violently. Salah Ahmed Al-Salami, from Yemen, was thirty-seven. Mani Shaman Al-Utaybi, from Saudi Arabia, was thirty. Yasser Talal Al-Zahrani, also from Saudi Arabia, was twenty-two, and had been imprisoned at Guantánamo since he was captured at the age of seventeen. None of the men had been charged with a crime, though all three had been engaged in hunger strikes to protest the conditions of their imprisonment. They were being held in a cell block, known as Alpha Block, reserved for particularly troublesome or high-value prisoners. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Iranian scientist killed by bomb had opposition links

Iranian scientist killed by bomb had opposition links
By Richard Spencer, The Telegraph, January 12, 2010

An Iranian nuclear physicist with ties to the reformist movement led by the opposition leader, Mir Hossein Moussavi, has been killed by a bomb near his home.

Dr Moussad Ali-Mohammadi was leaving his house on his way to work at Tehran University when the bomb, attached to a motorbike, went off, killing him instantly.

The Iranian authorities said they suspected the hand of exiled opposition movements working on behalf of America and Israel, a charge denied by Washington.

They drew parallels with the disappearance of a scientist attached to the country’s nuclear programme while on a pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, who the authorities say was kidnapped and handed over to the Americans.

But Dr Ali-Mohammadi’s academic work was highly theoretical and the body responsible for the country’s nuclear research programme, which has brought Iran into conflict with the West, said he had no connection with it.

Opposition movement supporters also said he was on a list of 240 academic backers of Mr Moussavi published before last year’s disputed election. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — It comes as little surprise that the Iranian government would be quick to accuse Israel and the US of being behind this assassination. The US is currently operating a far from covert assassination program in Pakistan and less than a year ago it was reported that Israel had launched a program specifically targeting Iran’s top nuclear scientists.

Last February, The Telegraph reported:

Israel has launched a covert war against Iran as an alternative to direct military strikes against Tehran’s nuclear programme, US intelligence sources have revealed.

It is using hitmen, sabotage, front companies and double agents to disrupt the regime’s illicit weapons project, the experts say.

The most dramatic element of the “decapitation” programme is the planned assassination of top figures involved in Iran’s atomic operations.

Israel is also widely assumed to have been behind the assassination of Imad Mughniyeh, a leading member of Hezbollah, in Damascus two years ago.

Governments that sanction or instigate assassinations have a hard time pleading innocence.

So, does this mean that Mossad is the prime suspect in this case? Probably not. More likely this was instigated by the regime itself. The killing would send multiple messages:

1. The official line – foreign enemies of the state are on the lose and Iranians must stand together to face this threat.
2. Those who support the opposition are risking their lives by doing so.
3. Any Iranian nuclear scientists who might consider defection have been served notice that they might meet the same fate.

Facebooktwittermail

We’re keeping detainees in the camp because we’re afraid of things they haven’t done yet?

We’re keeping detainees in the camp because we’re afraid of things they haven’t done yet?
By Dahlia Lithwick, Slate, January 6, 2010

When it comes to being detained indefinitely at Guantanamo Bay, it’s not so much what you know as whom you know. Or whom you are alleged to know. Or whom you may know. Someday.

That was the case back in 2002—when the government’s own best evidence showed that most of the detainees had been picked up for “associating” with the Taliban or al-Qaida (and that most were turned in for bounties rather than captured by U.S. forces). And it’s still the case this week, as the Obama administration announces that about 30 Yemeni prisoners—already cleared for release from the camp—will not be freed after all, merely because they’re from Yemen. The clearance they’ve received is now meaningless: Men poised to begin their ninth year of incarceration at the camp will remain there, not because of anything they have done, but in fear of whom they may meet on the streets back home in Yemen. The new twist, then, is that prisoners can now be held indefinitely not just because they once knew a terrorist, but because they may meet one someday in the future. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Judge tosses out most evidence on Gitmo detainee

Judge tosses out most evidence on Gitmo detainee
By Pete Yost, AP, January 8, 2010

A federal judge has tossed out most of the government’s evidence against a tarrorism detainee on grounds his confessions were coerced, allegedly by U.S. forces, before he became a prisoner at Guantanamo Bay.

In a ruling this week, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan also said the government failed to establish that 23 statements the detainee made to interrogators at Guantanamo Bay were untainted by the earlier coerced statements made while he was held under harsh conditions in Afghanistan.

However, the judge said statements he made during two military administrative hearings at the U.S. detention center in Cuba, where he was assisted by a personal representative, were reliable and sufficient to justify holding the detainee. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Blackwater and the Khost bombing: Is the CIA deceiving Congress (yet again)?

Blackwater and the Khost bombing: Is the CIA deceiving Congress (yet again)?
By Jeremy Scahill, The Nation, January 6, 2010

A leading member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence has told The Nation that she will launch an investigation into why two Blackwater contractors were among the dead in the December 30 suicide bombing at the CIA station at Forward Operating Base Chapman in Khost, Afghanistan. “The Intelligence Committees and the public were led to believe that the CIA was phasing out its contracts with Blackwater and now we find out that there is this ongoing presence,” said Illinois Democrat Jan Schakowsky, chair of the Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations, in an interview. “Is the CIA once again deceiving us about the relationship with Blackwater?”

In December, the CIA announced that the agency had canceled its contract with Blackwater to work on the agency’s drone bombing campaign in Afghanistan and Pakistan and said Director Leon Panetta ordered a review of all existing CIA contracts with Blackwater. “At this time, Blackwater is not involved in any CIA operations other than in a security or support role,” CIA spokesman George Little said December 11.

But Schakowsky said the fact that two Blackwater personnel were in such close proximity to the December 30 suicide bomber–an alleged double agent, who was reportedly meeting with CIA agents including the agency’s second-ranking officer in Afghanistan when he blew himself up–shows how “deeply enmeshed” Blackwater remains in sensitive CIA operations, including those CIA officials claim it no longer participates in, such as intelligence gathering and briefings with valuable agency assets. [continued…]

Sources: Suspected drone strikes kill militants in Pakistan
CNN, January 6, 2010

At least 13 suspected militants were killed in a tribal region of Pakistan near the Afghan border Wednesday, apparently by missiles fired from unmanned U.S. aircraft, two Pakistani intelligence sources told CNN.

The strikes are the fourth and fifth suspected drone strikes in less than a week, and come after a suicide bomber killed seven Central Intelligence Agency officers and contractors on December 30. [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — Soon after the Khost bombing, unnamed CIA officials promised there would be revenge attacks, yet one has to wonder whether the CIA is now conducting attacks so indiscriminate that they have unequivocally become acts of terrorism. The New York Times reported:

Officials in Afghanistan and Washington said the C.I.A. group in Khost had been particularly aggressive in recent months against the Haqqani network, a militant group that has claimed responsibility for dozens of American deaths in Afghanistan. One NATO official in Afghanistan spoke in stark terms about the attack, saying it had “effectively shut down a key station.”

“These were not people who wrote things down in the computer or in notebooks. It was all in their heads,” he said. The C.I.A. is “pulling in new people from all over the world, but how long will it take to rebuild the networks, to get up to speed? Lots of it is irrecoverable. Lots of it.”

So the CIA is now struggling to get up to speed, the intelligence knowledge possessed by a key group involved in targeting Predator attacks has irrecoverably been lost and Hellfire missiles are raining down.

Facebooktwittermail

CIA reportedly ordered Blackwater to murder 9/11 suspect

CIA reportedly ordered Blackwater to murder 9/11 suspect
By Diana Sweet, Raw Story, January 5, 2010

In 2004, the CIA sent a team from the private security firm Blackwater, now Xe, to Hamburg to kill an alleged al Qaeda financier who was investigated for years by German authorities on suspicion of links to al Qaeda, according to a little-highlighted element in a Vanity Fair article to be published this month.

The report cited a source familiar with the program as saying the mission had been kept secret from the German government.

“Among the team’s targets, according to a source familiar with the program, was Mamoun Darkazanli, an al Qaeda financier living in Hamburg who had been on the agency’s radar for years because of his ties to three of the 9/11 hijackers and to operatives convicted of the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in East Africa,” writes Vanity Fair’s Adam Ciralsky. [continued…]

Germany knows nothing of alleged CIA murder plot
Reuters, January 4, 2010

The German government said on Monday it knew nothing about a magazine report that the CIA had planned a secret operation to kill a German-Syrian in Hamburg linked to the September 11 attacks on U.S. targets.

The U.S. magazine Vanity Fair had reported that the CIA had in 2004 sent a team from the private security firm Blackwater, now Xe, to Hamburg to kill Mamoun Darkazanli, who was investigated for years by German authorities on suspicion of links to al Qaeda. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Over 700 killed in 44 drone strikes in 2009

Over 700 killed in 44 drone strikes in 2009
Dawn, January 2, 2010

Of the 44 predator strikes carried out by US drones in the tribal areas of Pakistan over the past 12 months, only five were able to hit their actual targets, killing five key Al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders, but at the cost of over 700 innocent civilians.

According to the statistics compiled by Pakistani authorities, the Afghanistan-based US drones killed 708 people in 44 predator attacks targeting the tribal areas between January 1 and December 31, 2009.

For each Al Qaeda and Taliban terrorist killed by US drones, 140 innocent Pakistanis also had to die. Over 90 per cent of those killed in the deadly missile strikes were civilians, claim authorities. [continued…]

Taliban: CIA attack was retaliation for drone strikes
By Anand Gopal, Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2010

A senior commander connected to the Afghan Taliban and involved with the attack against the CIA that left eight people dead said Saturday that the bombing was retaliation for U.S. drone strikes in the Afghan-Pakistan border region.

“We attacked this base because the team there was organizing drone strikes in Loya Paktia and surrounding area,” the commander said, referring to the area around Khost, the city where the U.S. facility was attacked. The commander, a prominent member of the Afghan insurgency, spoke on the condition of anonymity.

The suicide attack, which dealt the biggest loss to the agency in more than 25 years, killed a woman who was the station chief along with six other CIA officers and one private security contractor. [continued…]

CIA attacker driven in from Pakistan
By Aleem Agha and Nick Schifrin, ABC News, January 2, 2010

The suicide bomber who killed at least six Central Intelligence Agency officers in a base along the Afghan-Pakistan border on Wednesday was a regular CIA informant who had visited the same base multiple times in the past, according to someone close to the base’s security director.

The informant was a Pakistani and a member of the Wazir tribe from the Pakistani tribal area North Waziristan, according to the same source. The base security director, an Afghan named Arghawan, would pick up the informant at the Ghulam Khan border crossing and drive him about two hours into Forward Operating Base Chapman, from where the CIA operates. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

The NYT’s view of “journalistic objectivity”

The NYT’s view of “journalistic objectivity”
By Glenn Greenwald, Salon, December 23, 2009

I‘ve written many times before about Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera cameraman who was abducted by the U.S. in late 2001, tortured at Bagram, sent to Guantanamo for seven years — where he was never charged with any crime and was interrogated overwhelmingly about Al Jazeera’s operations, not about Terrorism — and then suddenly released without explanation last year, as though the whole thing never happened. The due-process-free imprisonment of this journalist by the U.S. government was ignored almost completely by the American media (other than Nicholas Kristof), even as it righteously obsessed on the far shorter imprisonment of journalists by countries such as Iran and North Korea (hey, look over there at those tyrannical countries – they imprison our journalists!!!!!). Aside from al-Hajj, we’ve imprisoned numerous other journalists without charges in Iraq — and continue to this day to do so — including ones who work for Reuters and the Associated Press.

Today, The New York Times’ media reporter Brian Stelter profiles al-Hajj, who is now an on-air correspondent for Al Jazeera. The article recounts the details of al-Hajj’s detention, his description of his torture, and the physical and psychological wounds he still suffers from his treatment at the hands of his American captors. All things considered, the article is a decent effort to explain what happened, and Stelter deserves credit for bringing some desperately needed attention to this story. Nonetheless, the article contains some rather striking and revealing passages, beginning with this:

Among Al Jazeera’s viewers in the Arab world since the 9/11 attacks, perhaps nothing has damaged perceptions of America more than Guantánamo Bay. For that reason, Mr. Hajj, who did a six-part series on the prison after his release, is a potent weapon for the network, which does not always strive for journalistic objectivity on the subject of his treatment. In an interview, Ahmed Sheikh, the editor in chief of Al Jazeera, called Mr. Hajj “one of the victims of the human rights atrocities committed by the ex-U.S. administration.”

It’s amazing that the NYT would claim that Al Jazeera’s description of the Bush administration’s conduct as it concerns al-Hajj and other detainees — “one of the victims of the human rights atrocities committed by the ex-U.S. administration” — departs from precepts of “journalistic objectivity.” How can the lawless detention, brutal torture, numerous detainee deaths, obvious targeting of unfriendly media outlets, and explicit renunciation of the Gevena Conventions be described in any other way? The breach of “journalistic objectivity” comes not from calling this conduct what it is, but from refusing to do so — from obfuscating what took place by using soothing euphemisms and according equal deference to the plainly false denials of those who did it, such as what takes place in these passages Stelter wrote: [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. imprisoned Iranian engineer secretly for two years before sentencing

U.S. imprisoned Iranian engineer secretly for two years before sentencing
By Justin Elliot, TPM, December 15, 2009

In a case drawing criticism from outside lawyers, an Iranian engineer sentenced to prison Monday for violating arms control laws was lured to the nation of Georgia by American authorities for a fake arms deal, arrested, extradited to the U.S., and held in prison for two years — including months in solitary confinement before his guilty plea last year — all totally in secret, according to the Justice Department and media reports.

Export control lawyers told Politico’s Laura Rozen the politically-charged case of Amir Hossein Ardebili — which was under seal until this month — is troubling for two reasons: first, he was an Iranian who never left Iran, nonetheless lured out of the country and targeted by U.S. law enforcement; and, second, that he was sentenced after two years of secret imprisonment.

The Justice Department says the case was kept under seal for so long to protect ongoing investigations based on information obtained in the Ardebili probe. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Secret jails and torture under Obama’s watch

2 Afghans allege abuse at U.S. site
By Joshua Partlow and Julie Tate, Washington Post, November 28, 2009

Two Afghan teenagers held in U.S. detention north of Kabul this year said they were beaten by American guards, photographed naked, deprived of sleep and held in solitary confinement in concrete cells for at least two weeks while undergoing daily interrogation about their alleged links to the Taliban.

The accounts could not be independently substantiated. But in successive, on-the-record interviews, the teenagers presented a detailed, consistent portrait suggesting that the abusive treatment of suspected insurgents has in some cases continued under the Obama administration, despite steps that President Obama has said would put an end to the harsh interrogation practices authorized by the Bush administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The two teenagers — Issa Mohammad, 17, and Abdul Rashid, who said he is younger than 16 — said in interviews this week that they were punched and slapped in the face by their captors during their time at Bagram air base, where they were held in individual cells. Rashid said his interrogator forced him to look at pornography alongside a photograph of his mother. [continued…]

Afghans detail detention in ‘black jail’ at U.S. base
By Alissa J Rubin, New York Times, November 29, 2009

An American military detention camp in Afghanistan is still holding inmates, sometimes for weeks at a time, without access to the International Committee of the Red Cross, according to human rights researchers and former detainees held at the site on the Bagram Air Base.

The site, known to detainees as the black jail, consists of individual windowless concrete cells, each illuminated by a single light bulb glowing 24 hours a day. In interviews, former detainees said that their only human contact was at twice-daily interrogation sessions.

“The black jail was the most dangerous and fearful place,” said Hamidullah, a spare-parts dealer in Kandahar who said he was detained there in June. “They don’t let the I.C.R.C. officials or any other civilians see or communicate with the people they keep there. Because I did not know what time it was, I did not know when to pray.”

The jail’s operation highlights a tension between President Obama’s goal to improve detention conditions that had drawn condemnation under the Bush administration and his stated desire to give military commanders leeway to operate. While Mr. Obama signed an order to eliminate so-called black sites run by the Central Intelligence Agency in January, it did not also close this jail, which is run by military Special Operations forces. [continued…]

Matthew Hoh speaks grim truth to power
By Roger Morris and George Kenney, Huffington Post, November 27, 2009

The rare resignation on principle is always telling in American government. When Matthew Hoh recently left the State Department — a Marine Captain in Iraq who became a diplomat in Afghanistan — his act was significant far beyond the first reports.

Hoh speaks grim truth to power. His message is that to pursue the Afghan war policy in any guise — regardless of the troop level President Obama now chooses — will be utter folly, trapping America in an unwinnable civil war in the Hindu Kush, and only fueling terrorism. [continued…]

Senate report explores 2001 escape by bin Laden from Afghan mountains
By Scott Shane, New York Times, November 29, 2009

As President Obama vows to “finish the job” in Afghanistan by sending more troops, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee has completed a detailed look back at a crucial failure early in the battle against Al Qaeda: the escape of Osama bin Laden from American forces in the Afghan mountains of Tora Bora in December 2001.

“Removing the Al Qaeda leader from the battlefield eight years ago would not have eliminated the worldwide extremist threat,” the committee’s report concludes. “But the decisions that opened the door for his escape to Pakistan allowed bin Laden to emerge as a potent symbolic figure who continues to attract a steady flow of money and inspire fanatics worldwide.”

The report, based in part on a little-noticed 2007 history of the Tora Bora episode by the military’s Special Operations Command, asserts that the consequences of not sending American troops in 2001 to block Mr. bin Laden’s escape into Pakistan are still being felt.

The report blames the lapse for “laying the foundation for today’s protracted Afghan insurgency and inflaming the internal strife now endangering Pakistan.”

Its release comes just as the Obama administration is preparing to announce an increase in forces in Afghanistan. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Whatever happened to the CIA’s black sites?

Whatever happened to the CIA’s black sites?
By David Corn, Mother Jones, November 24, 2009

Whatever happened to the so-called “black sites,” where suspected terrorists were held overseas by the CIA and submitted to harsh interrogations that included torture? On April 9, CIA chief Leon Panetta issued a statement notifying CIA employees that the agency “no longer operates detention facilities or black sites”—which were effectively shut down in the fall of 2006—”and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites.” In the months since then, lawyers for several terrorism suspects have been trying to determine the status of these sites, as they seek evidence for their cases. But the US government has refused to disclose anything about what it has done with these facilities.

In his statement, Panetta noted, “I have directed our Agency personnel to take charge of the decommissioning process and have further directed that the contracts for site security be promptly terminated.” (He added that the suspension of these private security contracts would save the agency up to $4 million.) Though Panetta’s order might have seemed like good news to civil libertarians and critics of the Bush-Cheney administration’s detention policies, lawyers for several detainees who had been held in such sites immediately worried about one thing: “We thought they would be destroying further evidence,” says George Brent Mickum IV, a lawyer for Abu Zubaydah, a captured terrorism suspect whom President George W. Bush described (probably errantly) as “one of the top three leaders” of al Qaeda. (In 2007, the CIA disclosed that it had destroyed videotapes of interrogations of Zubaydah, who was waterboarded 83 times.) [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

UK role in torture of British citizens in Pakistan condemned

UK role in torture of British citizens in Pakistan condemned
By Ian Cobain, The Guardian, November 24, 2009

Britain’s role in the torture of its own citizens in Pakistan is condemned today by one of the world’s leading human rights organisations as being cruel, counter-productive and in clear breach of international law.

In a damning report, published after an investigation spanning more than a year, Human Rights Watch (HRW) says the government finds itself in a “legally, morally and politically invidious position” through complicity in torture, and warns its moral legitimacy could be undermined.

The report by the New York-based NGO – entitled Cruel Britannia: British Complicity in the Torture and Ill-treatment of Terror Suspects in Pakistan – corroborates many of the findings of the Guardian’s own investigation into the mistreatment of people held during British-led counter-terrorism operations. [continued…]

Will Miliband address torture evidence?
By Louise Christian, The Guardian, November 24, 2009

Today sees the release by Human Rights Watch (HRW) of a searing exposé of the evidence against the British government of its complicity in the torture of people held in Pakistan suspected of terrorism. The report, Cruel Britannia, is based on evidence collected by Ali Dayan Hasan, a senior HRW researcher who interviewed not only suspects and their lawyers but also members of the Pakistani ISI agency who were involved in the torture. It corroborates and provides further detail for the investigative reporting on torture of the Guardian’s Ian Cobain, who recently won the Paul Foot award.

Human Rights Watch, a US-based organisation, has an excellent reputation for independence and fair-minded monitoring. The allegations that British security services knew about torture in Pakistan, took advantage of it and even encouraged it, must be taken very seriously.

The report analyses in some detail the “far from decisive” response of the UK government so far to these and other allegations. Foreign secretary David Miliband and others repeat a mantra that the UK government does not condone torture, but they have refused to investigate the allegations or to publish guidance to officials. Written instructions to security services interrogating suspects in Afghanistan after 9/11 disclosed earlier this year – while saying they should not be seen to “condone” torture – also made it clear that the UK government sanctions a blind eye. The instructions claimed (with dubious legality, let alone morality) that there was no obligation to intervene even when interrogators are aware of torture. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail