Category Archives: War on Terrorism

Rethinking our terrorist fears

Rethinking our terrorist fears
By Scott Shane, New York Times, September 27, 2009

Eight years after 9/11, the specter of terrorism still haunts the United States. Just last week, F.B.I. agents were working double time to unravel the alarming case of a Denver airport shuttle driver accused of training with explosives in Pakistan and buying bomb-making chemicals. In Dallas, a young Jordanian was charged with trying to blow up a skyscraper; in Springfield, Ill., a prison parolee was arrested for trying to attack the local federal building. Meanwhile, the Obama administration struggled to decide whether sending many more troops to Afghanistan would be the best way to forestall a future attack.

But important as they were, those news reports masked a surprising and perhaps heartening long-term trend: Many students of terrorism believe that in important ways, Al Qaeda and its ideology of global jihad are in a pronounced decline — with its central leadership thrown off balance as operatives are increasingly picked off by missiles and manhunts and, more important, with its tactics discredited in public opinion across the Muslim world.

“Al Qaeda is losing its moral argument about the killing of innocent civilians,” said Emile A. Nakhleh, who headed the Central Intelligence Agency’s strategic analysis program on political Islam until 2006. “They’re finding it harder to recruit. They’re finding it harder to raise money.”

Marc Sageman, a former C.I.A. officer and forensic psychiatrist, counted 10 serious plots with Western targets, successful and unsuccessful, that could be linked to Al Qaeda or its allies in 2004, a peak he believes was motivated by the American-led invasion of Iraq the year before. In 2008, he said, there were just three. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Military strikes won’t help stabilise Somalia

Military strikes won’t help stabilise Somalia
By Nuradin Dirie, The Guardian, September 15, 2009

The killing of Saleh Ali Nabhan, a leader of al-Shabab, in Somalia yesterday dramatically reduced the list of wanted terrorist individuals in the country. I say dramatically, because the total number of known terrorists in Somalia is no more than half a dozen. This is the paradoxical story of the war on terror in Somalia.

On the one hand, the implication of terrorism, its related activities and global reach, were not significant enough to generate serious international involvement to deal with the country. This is why we continue to see ad hoc military strikes here and there without any coherent strategy to stabilise the country, dissociate thousands of young people from becoming radicalised and, most importantly, provide vital humanitarian assistance to millions of Somalis. On the other hand, the terrorist infrastructure in Somalia is severe enough to deny the country any sense of normality and stability, or for governance to take root.

Immediately after 11 September 2001, the US decided that global terrorist networks were not rooted enough in Somalia to warrant US involvement there – militarily, diplomatically or financially. The policy of containment which was put in place really seemed to mean “we will watch the country instead of help to fix it”. To the frustration of the UN, Somali politicians and neighbouring countries, the US did not play an active part in the Somali peace and reconciliation process. Even more bizarrely, during the peace talks, the US security establishment preferred to work with warlords instead of helping to put together a Somali government. As a consequence, the US undermined the peace process itself. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Who’s afraid of a terrorist haven?

Who’s afraid of a terrorist haven?
By Paul R. Pillar, Washington Post, September 16, 2009

Rationales for maintaining the counterinsurgency in Afghanistan are varied and complex, but they all center on one key tenet: that Afghanistan must not be allowed to again become a haven for terrorist groups, especially al-Qaeda. Debate about Afghanistan has raised reasons to question that tenet, one of which is that the top al-Qaeda leadership is not even in Afghanistan, having decamped to Pakistan years ago. Another is that terrorists intent on establishing a haven can choose among several unstable countries besides Afghanistan, and U.S. forces cannot secure them all.

The debate has largely overlooked a more basic question: How important to terrorist groups is any physical haven? More to the point: How much does a haven affect the danger of terrorist attacks against U.S. interests, especially the U.S. homeland? The answer to the second question is: not nearly as much as unstated assumptions underlying the current debate seem to suppose. When a group has a haven, it will use it for such purposes as basic training of recruits. But the operations most important to future terrorist attacks do not need such a home, and few recruits are required for even very deadly terrorism. Consider: The preparations most important to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks took place not in training camps in Afghanistan but, rather, in apartments in Germany, hotel rooms in Spain and flight schools in the United States.

In the past couple of decades, international terrorist groups have thrived by exploiting globalization and information technology, which has lessened their dependence on physical havens.

By utilizing networks such as the Internet, terrorists’ organizations have become more network-like, not beholden to any one headquarters. A significant jihadist terrorist threat to the United States persists, but that does not mean it will consist of attacks instigated and commanded from a South Asian haven, or that it will require a haven at all. Al-Qaeda’s role in that threat is now less one of commander than of ideological lodestar, and for that role a haven is almost meaningless. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

U.S. kills top Qaeda militant in southern Somalia

U.S. kills top Qaeda militant in southern Somalia
By Jeffrey Gettleman and Eric Schmitt, New York Times, September 15, 2009

American commandos killed one of the most wanted Islamic militants in Africa in a daylight raid in southern Somalia on Monday, according to American and Somali officials, an indication of the Obama administration’s willingness to use combat troops strategically against Al Qaeda’s growing influence in the region.

Western intelligence agents have described the militant, Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, as the ringleader of a Qaeda cell in Kenya responsible for the bombing of an Israeli hotel on the Kenyan coast in 2002. Mr. Nabhan may have also played a role in the attacks on two American embassies in East Africa in 1998.

American military forces have been hunting him for years, and on Monday, around 1 p.m., villagers near the town of Baraawe said four military helicopters suddenly materialized over the horizon and shot at two trucks rumbling through the desert.

The trucks were carrying leaders of the Shabab, an Islamist extremist group fighting to overthrow Somalia’s weak but internationally recognized government. The Shabab work hand-in-hand with foreign terrorists, according to Western and Somali agents, and in the past few months, as the battle for control of Somalia has intensified, the group seems to be drawing increasingly close to Al Qaeda. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Blackwater tapped foreigners on secret CIA program

Blackwater tapped foreigners on secret CIA program
By Adam Golman and Pamella Hess, AP, August 30, 2009

When the CIA revived a plan to kill or capture terrorists in 2004, the agency turned to the well-connected security company then known as Blackwater USA.

With Blackwater’s lucrative government security work and contacts arrayed in hot spots around the world, company officials offered the services of foreigners supposedly skilled at tracking terrorists in lawless regions and countries where the CIA had no working relationships with the government.

Blackwater told the CIA that it “could put people on the ground to provide the surveillance and support — all of the things you need to conduct an operation,” a former senior CIA official familiar with the secret program told The Associated Press.

But the CIA’s use of the private contractor as part of its now-abandoned plan to dispatch death squads skirted concerns now re-emerging with recent disclosures about Blackwater’s role. [continued…]

CIA’s black sites, illuminated
By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, August 31, 2009

Their transformations took place in a sensory cocoon: aboard a CIA aircraft, shackled in place, deprived of sight and sound by blindfolds, headsets and hoods.

They emerged into an existence that was hidden for most of the last eight years, but now is possible to glimpse through dozens of declassified files released by the Obama administration last week.

Scattered throughout, in the CIA’s clinical style, are descriptions of the prisoners’ surroundings, the extraordinary security measures with which they were handled, the often brutal search for answers they were thought to possess, and what passed for everyday life.

Some days seemed endless, illuminated around the clock by a pair of 17-watt fluorescent bulbs. White noise from the walkways filtered through the cell walls usually “in the range of 56-58” decibels, about as loud as people generally talk. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Sept. 11 plotter cooperated after waterboarding

Sept. 11 plotter cooperated after waterboarding
By Peter Finn, Joby Warrick and Julie Tate, Washington Post, August 29, 2009

The debate over the effectiveness of subjecting detainees to psychological and physical pressure is in some ways irresolvable, because it is impossible to know whether less coercive methods would have achieved the same result. But for defenders of waterboarding, the evidence is clear: Mohammed cooperated, and to an extraordinary extent, only when his spirit was broken in the month after his capture March 1, 2003, as the inspector general’s report and other documents released this week indicate.

Over a few weeks, he was subjected to an escalating series of coercive methods, culminating in 7 1/2 days of sleep deprivation, while diapered and shackled, and 183 instances of waterboarding. After the month-long torment, he was never waterboarded again.

“What do you think changed KSM’s mind?” one former senior intelligence official said this week after being asked about the effect of waterboarding. “Of course it began with that.” [continued…]

Editor’s Comment — As Khalid Sheik Mohammed sits in his Guatanamo cell studying the Bible, Dick Cheney would have us believe that the turning point in his detention came when his will was broken by the unbearable stress provoked by his fear of drowning.

To those who buy the morally eviscerated argument that when it comes to torture, the ends justify the means, Mohammed’s case provides the causal clincher: “an avowed and truculent enemy of the United States” got waterboarded and was transformed into the CIA’s “preeminent source” on al-Qaeda. Waterboarding was for the intelligence operative no less powerful than alchemy.

But where’s the actual proof that Mohammed’s apparent change of heart was really the effect of his being tortured?

The one piece of common knowledge that captives and captors share (assuming that the captive does actually know something) is that the captive’s most valuable asset is time. The longer he can hold out, the less his intelligence is worth. By the time KSM “broke”, for all we know the breaking point had little to do with whether waterboarding bout 184 seemed unimaginably less tolerable than the preceding 183 instances; it might simply have marked the point in time at which KSM decided he had bought his collaborators as much time as they could effectively employ in their furious efforts at damage control that must have followed his capture.

Facebooktwittermail

Young Afghan freed from Gitmo to sue U.S.

Young Afghan freed from Gitmo to sue U.S.
AP, August 27, 2009

he family of one of the youngest prisoners ever held at Guantanamo plans to sue the U.S. government to compensate him for mistreatment and an adolescence lost to nearly seven years in a cell, his lawyers said Thursday.

Mohammed Jawad returned to Afghanistan this week after a military judge ruled that he was coerced into confessing that he threw a grenade at an unmarked vehicle in the capital in 2002. The attack wounded two American soldiers and their interpreter.

Afghan police delivered Jawad into U.S. custody and about a month later he was sent to the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Jawad and his family say he was 12 when he was arrested, and that he is now 19 years old. The Pentagon has said a bone scan showed he was about 17 when taken into custody. His defense lawyers decline to give an exact age for Jawad, who does not have a birth certificate, but say photos taken in Guantanamo showed that he had not gone through puberty. [continued…]

Abuse issue puts the C.I.A. and Justice Dept. at odds
By Peter Baker, David Johnson and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, August 28, 2009

With the appointment of a prosecutor to investigate detainee abuses, long-simmering conflicts between the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department burst into plain view this week, threatening relations between two critical players on President Obama’s national security team.

The tension between the agencies complicates how the administration handles delicate national security issues, particularly the tracking and capturing of suspected terrorists overseas. It also may distract Mr. Obama, who is trying to move beyond the battles of the Bush years to focus on an ambitious domestic agenda, most notably health care legislation.

The strains became evident inside the administration in the past several weeks. In July, Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, tried to head off the investigation, administration officials said. He sent the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, Stephen W. Preston, to Justice to persuade aides to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to abandon any plans for an inquiry. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

CIA said to use outsiders to put bombs on drones

CIA said to use outsiders to put bombs on drones
By James Risen and Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, August 21, 2009

From a secret division at its North Carolina headquarters, the company formerly known as Blackwater has assumed a role in Washington’s most important counterterrorism program: the use of remotely piloted drones to kill Al Qaeda’s leaders, according to government officials and current and former employees.

The division’s operations are carried out at hidden bases in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the company’s contractors assemble and load Hellfire missiles and 500-pound laser-guided bombs on remotely piloted Predator aircraft, work previously performed by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency. They also provide security at the covert bases, the officials said.

The role of the company in the Predator program highlights the degree to which the C.I.A. now depends on outside contractors to perform some of the agency’s most important assignments. And it illustrates the resilience of Blackwater, now known as Xe (pronounced Zee) Services, though most people in and outside the company still refer to it as Blackwater. It has grown through government work, even as it attracted criticism and allegations of brutality in Iraq. [continued…]

Detainees shown CIA officers’ photos
By Peter Finn, Washington Post, August 21, 2009

The Justice Department recently questioned military defense attorneys at Guantanamo Bay about whether photographs of CIA personnel, including covert officers, were unlawfully provided to detainees charged with organizing the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to sources familiar with the investigation.

Investigators are looking into allegations that laws protecting classified information were breached when three lawyers showed their clients the photographs, the sources said. The lawyers were apparently attempting to identify CIA officers and contractors involved in the agency’s interrogation of al-Qaeda suspects in facilities outside the United States, where the agency employed harsh techniques.

If detainees at the U.S. military prison in Cuba are tried, either in federal court or by a military commission, defense lawyers are expected to attempt to call CIA personnel to testify. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Tom Ridge, in book, tells of pressure on ’04 vote

Bush official, in book, tells of pressure on ’04 vote
By Peter Baker, New York Times, August 21, 2009

Tom Ridge, the first secretary of homeland security, asserts in a new book that he was pressured by top advisers to President George W. Bush to raise the national threat level just before the 2004 election in what he suspected was an effort to influence the vote.

After Osama bin Laden released a threatening videotape four days before the election, Attorney General John Ashcroft and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld pushed Mr. Ridge to elevate the public threat posture but he refused, according to the book. Mr. Ridge calls it a “dramatic and inconceivable” event that “proved most troublesome” and reinforced his decision to resign.

The provocative allegation provides fresh ammunition for critics who have accused the Bush administration of politicizing national security. Mr. Bush and his Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, were locked in a tight race heading into that final weekend, and some analysts concluded that even without a higher threat level, the bin Laden tape helped the president win re-election by reminding voters of the danger of Al Qaeda. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

CIA sought Blackwater’s help in plan to kill jihadists

CIA sought Blackwater’s help in plan to kill jihadists
By Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, August 20, 2009

The Central Intelligence Agency in 2004 hired outside contractors from the private security contractor Blackwater USA as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda, according to current and former government officials.

Executives from Blackwater, which has generated controversy because of its aggressive tactics in Iraq, helped the spy agency with planning, training and surveillance. The C.I.A. spent several million dollars on the program, which did not successfully capture or kill any terrorist suspects.

The fact that the C.I.A. used an outside company for the program was a major reason that Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A.’s director, became alarmed and called an emergency meeting in June to tell Congress that the agency had withheld details of the program for seven years, the officials said.

It is unclear whether the C.I.A. had planned to use the contractors to actually capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance in the program. American spy agencies have in recent years outsourced some highly controversial work, including the interrogation of prisoners. But government officials said that bringing outsiders into a program with lethal authority raised deep concerns about accountability in covert operations.

Officials said the C.I.A. did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune. Blackwater’s work on the program actually ended years before Mr. Panetta took over the agency, after senior C.I.A. officials themselves questioned the wisdom of using outsiders in a targeted killing program.

Blackwater, which has changed its name, most recently to Xe Services, and is based in North Carolina, in recent years has received millions of dollars in government contracts, growing so large that the Bush administration said it was a necessary part of its war operation in Iraq. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Judge faults freezing of assets in terror case

Judge faults freezing of assets in terror case
By Eric Lichtblau, New York Times, August 20, 2009

In a ruling that threw into doubt one of the government’s main counterterrorism tools, a federal judge said the Treasury Department acted unconstitutionally three years ago when it froze the assets of an Ohio charity suspected of aiding terrorists.

The ruling challenged a key tactic used by the government under an emergency executive order signed by President George W. Bush two weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks. If upheld, the ruling could severely undercut the government’s authority and ultimately require it to get a warrant and submit to court review in moving against charities.

In the last eight years, the Treasury Department has used its broadened authority to freeze tens of millions of dollars in assets held by eight charities within the United States and hundreds of other groups and individuals outside this country, all without warrants and court approval.

The ruling was issued late Tuesday by James G. Carr, the chief federal judge in northern Ohio. Judge Carr set a hearing in September to determine how to correct what he said were constitutional flaws in the government’s case. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

When it comes to terrorist suspects in detention, Obama is finding that Bush set a difficult precedent to break

Overdue process
By Adam Serwer, The American Prospect, August 17, 2009

The cavernous room in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C., was nearly empty, except for a few journalists holding yellow legal pads. A small parade of government lawyers marched in and rested their briefcases on their desks before approaching the trio of lawyers representing Mohammed Jawad, an Afghan national who was detained in 2002 after being accused of throwing a grenade at an American convoy, injuring several American soldiers. He was between 12 and 17 years old at the time and has been in U.S. custody for seven years. The hearing, held in June, was not related to Jawad’s guilt or innocence. Rather, it was his habeas corpus proceeding — the legal challenge to the government’s ability to hold him in the first place.

It is widely believed that Jawad’s confession, offered to Afghan authorities shortly after his capture, was coerced through torture. Jawad is illiterate, and the confession was written in a dialect he didn’t speak, accompanied by a separate page bearing only his thumbprint. His military defense attorney, Maj. Eric Montalvo, says that as soon as Jawad was asked about the incident in a language he could understand, he denied everything. Then, Montalvo says, Jawad was handed over to American interrogators who tortured him (“They did things that were classified”). After Jawad attempted suicide in his Guantánamo cell in 2003, he was subjected to the government’s “frequent flyer” program, in which the detainee is moved from cell to cell every few hours for days or weeks on end, in order to deny him sleep.

Because Jawad was technically captured “on the battlefield,” he appeared before a military commission in 2007. At the hearing, the presiding judge threw out the coerced confessions and the original prosecutor, Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, resigned in disgust, penning a letter in which he denounced the commissions as a travesty. Jawad has been denied a criminal trial, where his culpability might be determined according to the high standards of federal courts. “Under the Bush administration, there was this attempt to blur the criminal-justice system and the military-justice system and create this hybrid system that lacked due-process safeguards,” says Stacy Sullivan, a counterterrorism adviser for Human Rights Watch. “We hoped that during the Obama administration we’d be able to put those pieces back where they belong. That doesn’t seem to be happening.” [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Baghram isn’t the new Guantanamo, it’s the old Guantanamo

Baghram isn’t the new Guantanamo, it’s the old Guantanamo
By Andy Worthington, Huffington Post, August 15, 2009

Back in September 2005, when I first began researching Guantánamo for my book The Guantánamo Files, the prison was still shrouded in mystery, even though attorneys had been visiting prisoners for nearly a year, following the Supreme Court’s ruling, in June 2004, that they had habeas corpus rights. Researchers at the Washington Post and at Cageprisoners, a human rights organization in the U.K., had compiled tentative lists of who was being held, but, although these efforts were commendable, much of it was little more than groping in the dark — a broken jigsaw puzzle based on media reports and interviews with released prisoners — because the Bush administration refused to provide details of the names and nationalities of those it was holding.

In April 2006 — four years and three months after Guantánamo opened — the government finally conceded defeat, after the Associated Press took the Pentagon to court, and won. That month, the first ever list of prisoners (PDF) — containing the names and nationalities of the 558 prisoners who had been subjected to the administration’s Combatant Status Review Tribunals (one-sided reviews, designed to rubberstamp their prior designation as “enemy combatants”) — was released, and was followed in May by a list of the 759 prisoners held up to that point (including the 201 who had been released before the tribunals began), which included names, nationalities, and, where known, dates of birth and places of birth (PDF).

The government also released 8,000 pages of tribunal transcripts and allegations against the prisoners, which pierced the veil of secrecy still further, allowing outside observers, as well as lawyers, the opportunity to examine whether the government’s claims that the prison was full of terrorists were true, and to conclude that, actually, the prison was largely populated by innocent men or low-level Taliban foot soldiers, recruited to fight an inter-Muslim civil war that began long before the 9/11 attacks, and had nothing to do with al-Qaeda or international terrorism. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

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…]

Facebooktwittermail

Target of Obama-era rendition alleges torture

Target of Obama-era rendition alleges torture
By Scott Horton, Huffington Post, August 11, 2009

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama sharply criticized the Bush Administration’s extraordinary renditions program. “To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. “This means ending the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of law.” But Obama was consistently careful never to commit to ending the practice of rendition entirely. When the issue flared shortly after his inauguration, senior administration officials were quick to say that abuses including torture would end, but that “ordinary” renditions – the spiriting away of suspects from other countries without going through the formal process of extradition — would be continued in a cleaned-up form. Now in a federal court in suburban Washington, a case is unfolding that gives us a practical sense of what an Obama-era rendition looks like.

Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education, is employed by Sima International, a Lebanon-based contractor that does work for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch.

According to court papers, on April 7, 2009, Azar and a Lebanese-American colleague, Dinorah Cobos, were seized by “at least eight” heavily armed FBI agents in Kabul, Afghanistan, where they had traveled for a meeting to discuss the status of one of his company’s U.S. government contracts. The trip ended with Azar alighting in manacles from a Gulfstream V executive jet in Manassas, Virginia, where he was formally arrested and charged in a federal antitrust probe.

This rendition involved no black sites and was clearly driven by a desire to get the target quickly before a court. Also unlike renditions of the Bush-era, the target wasn’t even a terror suspect; rather, he was suspected of fraud. But in a troubling intimation of the last administration, accusations of torture hover menacingly over the case. According to papers filed by his lawyers, Azar was threatened, subjected to coercive interrogation techniques and induced to sign a confession. Azar claims he was hooded, stripped naked (while being photographed) and subjected to a “body cavity search.”

On a ride to the infamous Bagram air base in Afghanistan — site of the torture-homicides involving U.S. interrogators exposed in the Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side — Azar contends that a federal agent pulled a photograph of Azar’s wife and four children from his wallet. Confess that you were bribing the contract officer, the agent allegedly said, or you may “never see them again.” Azar told his lawyers he interpreted that as a threat to do physical harm to his family. [continued…]

2 U.S. architects of harsh tactics in 9/11’s wake
By Scott Shane, New York Times, August 12, 2009

Col. Steven M. Kleinman, an Air Force interrogator and intelligence officer who knows Dr. Mitchell and Dr. Jessen, said he thought loyalty to their country in the panicky wake of the Sept. 11 attacks prompted their excursion into interrogation. He said the result was a tragedy for the country, and for them.

“I feel their primary motivation was they thought they had skills and insights that would make the nation safer,” Colonel Kleinman said. “But good persons in extreme circumstances can do horrific things.”

For the C.I.A., as well as for the gray-goateed Dr. Mitchell, 58, and the trim, dark-haired Dr. Jessen, 60, the change in administrations has been neck-snapping. For years, President George W. Bush declared the interrogation program lawful and praised it for stopping attacks. Mr. Obama, by contrast, asserted that its brutality rallied recruits for Al Qaeda; called one of the methods, waterboarding, torture; and, in his first visit to the C.I.A., suggested that the interrogation program was among the agency’s “mistakes.”

The psychologists’ subsequent fall from official grace has been as swift as their rise in 2002. Today the offices of Mitchell Jessen and Associates, the lucrative business they operated from a handsome century-old building in downtown Spokane, Wash., sit empty, its C.I.A. contracts abruptly terminated last spring. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor denounces Bush-era policies

Obama’s counter-terrorism advisor denounces Bush-era policies
By Greg Miller, Los Angeles Times, August 7, 2009

President Obama’s counter-terrorism chief on Thursday repeatedly rebuked the Bush administration in a speech designed to make the case for a broader approach to fighting Islamic extremism.

In his first public appearance as the White House counter-terrorism advisor, John O. Brennan said that President George W. Bush’s policies had been an affront to American values, undermined the nation’s security and fostered a “global war” mind-set that served only to “validate Al Qaeda’s twisted worldview.” [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Allegations that Britain colluded in torture of terror suspects reach European court

Allegations that Britain colluded in torture of terror suspects reach European court
By Ian Cobain, The Guardian, August 2, 2009

Amin says that he was beaten, whipped, deprived of sleep and threatened with an electric drill while being asked questions that would subsequently be put to him again during non-violent interviews by two MI5 officers. Before Amin went on trial, the judge ruled that his conditions in ISI custody had been “physically oppressive” but that he had exaggerated his mistreatment and that it fell short of torture.

Since then, Human Rights Watch (HRW), the New York-based NGO, has spoken to a number of Pakistani intelligence officers who they say corroborated the accounts of torture given by several British citizens alleging UK complicity.

In the case of Amin, according to HRW, the Pakistani sources said his account was “essentially accurate”, adding that it was a “high-pressure” case and the desire for information on the part of both British and American authorities was “insatiable”. HRW add that their sources say British intelligence officials were “perfectly aware that we were using all means possible to extract information from him and were grateful that we were doing so”. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail

Clinton moved to halt disclosure of CIA torture evidence, court told

Clinton moved to halt disclosure of CIA torture evidence, court told
By Richard Norton-Taylor, The Guardian, July 29, 2009

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, personally intervened to suppress evidence of CIA collusion in the torture of a British resident, the high court heard today.

The dramatic turn emerged as lawyers for Binyam Mohamed, the UK resident abused in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Morocco and Guantánamo Bay, joined by lawyers for the Guardian and other media groups, asked the court to order the disclosure of CIA material.

It consists of a seven-paragraph summary of what the CIA knew, and what it told MI5 and MI6, about the treatment of Mohamed. Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones, the judges hearing the case, have said that the summary contains nothing that could possibly be described as “highly sensitive classified US intelligence”. [continued…]

Incongruities in NC terrorism case
By Jeff Stein, CQ, July 29, 2009

The feds have been hyping their domestic terrorism cases for several years now, and the arrest of seven North Carolina men this week appears to be no exception.

The headliners in the case, of course, are ordinary folks Daniel Patrick Boyd and his two sons, who prosecutors say led three lives: good family men, likeable neighbors and secret terrorists. [continued…]

Facebooktwittermail