Purpose redacted

Among the documents that the ACLU forced the government to release is this CIA guide to its use of abusive rendition and interrogation techniques from late 2004 (PDF). It acknowledges that the goal of these processes is systematically to condition the prisoners into a state of "learned helplessness and dependence". And this in a document faxed to the Justice Department. By summarizing these abusive techniques in clinical fashion, the CIA has fashioned a deeply horrifying record of what it became under George W. Bush, one that in the past we might have associated with the Stasi's files.

Perhaps the most remarkable thing about this repulsive document is one of the many redactions. In the second (?) paragraph, the CIA describes the purposes of its interrogations of terrorist suspects at "Black Sites" (its term). At least one of those purposes is redacted. In other words, the purpose remains classified! This is one with the evolving series of justifications that the CIA has offered over the years for the interrogation program. It cannot decide quite what it wants the rest of us to believe was the ultimate rationale for treating prisoners in ways that plainly are unAmerican.

Here is what remains unredacted of the CIA's rationale for the abusive interrogation program:

The purpose of interrogation is to persuade High-Value Detainees (HVD) to provide threat information and terrorist intelligence in a timely manner, to allow the US Government to identify and disrupt terrorist plots [... redacted line]
[...] and to collect critical intelligence on al-Qa'ida [... 4 lines redacted]

[...] In support of information previously sent to the Department of Justice, this paper provides additional background on how interrogation techniques are used ...

Thus at least one of the stated purposes has been redacted here. That is a silent demonstration of what many have suspected all along, that under George Bush and Dick Cheney abusive interrogations were a policy in search of a rationale. Were they about obtaining intelligence from captives while it was still most current? Disrupting as many plots around the world as possible? Learning about Al Qaeda? Or some of the other reasons that have been proffered in the past? Identifying and arresting further terrorists? Building cases for prosecuting terrorist suspects? Fear of an imminent attack upon the US? Or just showing that the US was determined to 'take the gloves off', in Cheney's phrase? Even at this late date, the CIA can't bring itself to say.

As the ACLU's Alexander Abdo said to Greg Sargent, "This is the most detailed description provided by the CIA of its rendition program to date... It confirms accounts provided by victims of rendition.”

Those prisoner accounts of their experiences during extraordinary rendition flights and flights to Guantanamo prison, as I've remarked here repeatedly, go back to the beginning of 2002. Hence the earliest accounts predate by several months the attempts by the Bush administration lawyers to generate torture memos to justify retrospectively all manner of mistreatment of terrorist suspects, from "conditioning" to "coercion", that were already in common use around the globe. As the prisoner accounts show, the mistreatment had been systematized from the outset – very much in the manner described in this CIA memo (which has a section describing methods to be used in the capture and transfer of prisoners on rendition flights).

This fact leaves a great many Bush administration officials, including the authors of those egregious memos, exposed to prosecution for ordering or abetting torture and abuse of prisoners. They had relied upon legal memos to function as 'get out of jail free' cards, under the pretense that everybody from the White House down to the actual interrogator were just following the advice of the administration's lawyers. But much evidence has accumulated that that advice was cooked, with administration officials soliciting exactly the opinions they wanted and playing footsie with lawyers until the desired advice was forthcoming.

The Bush Administration claimed that Justice gave legal advice to the CIA and that the CIA followed and applied it. But the IG report reveals a strikingly different relationship. As the OLC memos were written, there was a sort of waltz between CIA and Justice lawyers in which different hypotheticals were offered up in solicitation of opinions—something on the order of “If we told you we did x, what would you say about it?” This suggests the OLC memos were effectively negotiated. It also appears that CIA requested a number of after-the-fact variations to protect practices that clearly exceeded guidance. Why does this matter? It undermines the ability of CIA employees and contractors to “rely in good faith” on the OLC memos, because it shows that OLC wasn’t really giving legal advice. Instead it was issuing “get out of jail free” cards. A good example comes with waterboarding: “With respect to two detainees at those sites, the use and frequency of one EIT, the waterboard, went beyond the projected use of the technique as originally described to DoJ. The Agency, on 29 July 2003, secured oral DoJ concurrence that certain deviations are not significant for the purposes of DoJ’s legal opinions.”

Now it is even clearer that the advice was several months too late to justify practices that had already been worked out, systematized, and put into practice. That reinforces the interpretation that the legal opinions were cooked, and thus that those implicated in the prisoner abuse cannot now claim that they were relying upon legal advice that they assumed in good faith to be reliable.

In fact, the 2004 CIA Inspector General's report on terrorist interrogations shows conclusively that many within the CIA did not believe that the official policies were legal. It reports that CIA officers feared and indeed assumed that they would be subject to investigation and prosecution for engaging in torture and abuse. Some CIA officials took a strong stance against the program on the grounds of its illegality.

The Inspector General’s review was launched by complaints coming from valued senior employees who felt that the Bush Program (as John Yoo has dubbed it) was wrong. One of them actually expresses his worry that those involved will be hauled before the World Court at some point because of [and that’s redacted!] This makes clear that good employees of the agency opposed the Bush Program, were vocal in their opposition, and focused concern on the program’s illegality. The OLC memos were intended to silence these complaints, but they only accentuated the agency’s morale problems by enmeshing it in obviously illegal and immoral conduct. By contrast, the number of CIA personnel involved in pushing it through and supporting it is tiny—probably not many more than two dozen—though their voices are heard very loudly.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Does anybody at the Washington Post read?

Anne Kornblut, one of the best WaPo reporters, makes a gross factual error her report on the circumstances under which terrorism suspects will be interrogated in the Obama administration. There's to be a new unit of specially trained interrogators. The unit's purpose allegedly will not be to obtain information to put the prisoners on trial, but "to glean intelligence, especially about potential terrorist attacks". That was also the thrust of George W. Bush's infamous interrogation programs. The new unit will be housed in the FBI but report directly to the National Security Council. It will operate under the rules set out in the newly (2006) revised Army Field Manual.

Kornblut parrots the line propagated initially by the Bush administration, and repeated by Democrats: that the AFM strictly adheres to the Geneva Conventions and prohibits all forms of torture, abuse, and degradation of prisoners. Quite the contrary is true. The new Army Field Manual rules (while a vast improvement over the outrageous practices used by the CIA and DoD and authorization from the Bush administration) do in fact specify ways that prisoners may be abused. The abuse is euphemistically termed 'separation' and codified in Appendix M of the Manual.

Here is Kornblut's assessment of the new interrogation policy:

Using the Army Field Manual means certain techniques in the gray zone between torture and legal questioning -- such as playing loud music or depriving prisoners of sleep -- will not be allowed. Which tactics are acceptable was an issue "looked at thoroughly," one senior official said. Obama had already banned certain severe measures that the Bush administration had permitted, such as waterboarding.

The phrase "gray zone" ought to be an immediate tip off that the author is spinning the truth. There is no legitimate doubt that the use of deafening noise and sleep deprivation to 'soften up' prisoners is torture and illegal in the US. It was the Bush administration that sought to convince Americans that long prohibited practices somehow fell into a middle ground between the legal and the illegal. They did succeed in convincing most major news outlets to refrain from calling torture 'torture', which is why reporters like Kornblut continue in this absurd pretense.

In any case, can Kornblut or her editors be bothered to read documents? The Army Field Manual (PDF) explicitly permits interrogators to use isolation and sleep deprivation on prisoners. References are to sections of Appendix M of the Manual. Prisoners may be confined in total isolation for up to 30 days, and even longer if approval is sought up the chain of command (M-29). Furthermore, the Manual states (on the very last page of its last appendix) that prisoners need not be permitted more than 4 hours of sleep per day (M-30). Anybody who goes for weeks on only four hours of sleep will quickly become subject to all the psychological disturbances that sleep deprivation is notorious for.

Parenthetically, I note a passage worthy of Franz Kafka in Appendix M of the Manual. It asserts blandly (M-4) that 'separation' "is consistent with the minimum humane standards of treatment required by US law, the law of war, and does not constitute cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment as defined in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 and addressed in GPW Common Article III" (emphasis mine). The US is of course bound by more than the Detainee Treatment Act, but the Field Manual ignores that fact (making no mention, for example, of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment). Instead, the Appendix consistently pretends that its procedures are acceptable because they are not banned by the 2005 legislation.

Valtin has a lengthy discussion of how the Army Field Manual codifies some of the Bush administration's torture practices.

Meanwhile, no word yet about whether the new government's interrogation unit will continue (as the CIA did under Bush) to employ Blackwater to fly terrorist suspects from their confinement in Guantanamo prison to secret prisons around the world, including such hell holes as Uzbekistan. The purpose of these 'extraordinary renditions' was to subject the prisoners to "special treatment", according to an internal Blackwater memo obtained by Der Spiegel. As if the torture employed at Gitmo were not special enough.

Incidentally, the memo also reveals that the CIA's contract with Blackwater to establish roving assassination squads was overseen by none other than Alvin B. Krongard, the former Executive Director of the CIA (and upon his retirement, a director of Blackwater). He is the brother of Bush's corrupt and partisan Inspector General for the State Department, Howard Krongard, whose hacktacular career we described here two years ago.

crossposted from unbossed.com

Advocacy vs. cheerleading

I wonder if this good news will help to convince some Democrats that hard-nosed advocacy is more effective than silent hand-wringing or wishful thinking or worst of all, mere cheerleading for Democratic rule? That demanding reform is a mark of loyalty to their principles, rather than an embrace of the opposite? That the time to raise one's voice is before, not after, disastrous 'compromises' have been set in stone? That Democratic politicians respond to pressure, not to its absence?

John Brennan, the deputy to George Tenet when the CIA was forging and implementing an array of illegal practices including the Bush administration's torture regime, a man who has since then defended and justified Bush's rendition, detention, and interrogation policies, was being widely touted as a likely choice to head the CIA under Barack Obama. This and several other liberal blogs decried the possibility, arguing that the next administration needed to break with the past and be seen to be doing so. And voila. Today Brennan announced that he was withdrawing his name from consideration for any intelligence posts in the next administration because of the opposition he has aroused. He did not want to be a distraction, he said.

Obama's advisers had grown increasingly concerned in recent days over online blogs that accused Brennan of condoning harsh interrogation tactics on terror suspects, including waterboarding, which critics consider torture.

His withdrawal was a concession to a political reality that Democratic activists created by concerted and principled opposition. It was not the result of an epiphany for Brennan or a sudden contrition over the positions he's adopted. Quite the opposite, in fact.

His letter of withdrawal, available here, shows that Brennan continues to deny any responsibility for the illegal policies. He says he "was not involved" in the decisions about the policies; and that his "criticism of these policies within government circles" was the reason he was passed over for promotion by the Bush administration. Those claims cannot easily be tested, of course, since they concern opinions and behavior manifested (if at all) only behind closed doors. Brennan even asserts now that he was (always?) "a strong opponent" of "coercive interrogation tactics" tout court. It's a claim that does not really measure up against his public statements - although Brennan later did renounce one specific technique, waterboarding. In any case, Brennan refuses to acknowledge that he was being criticized in particular for promoting and defending some of those policies after leaving the CIA. His public statements are the one arena in which we can assess his beliefs, and in that arena he looked rather shabby. Brennan can't bring himself in his letter to admit even this much, that he needed to explain his public positions on the CIA's legacy of controversial illegal policies.

Thus it's clear that what led to Brennan's withdrawal was not a sudden attack of conscientiousness. It was, instead, a concession to political reality. Activism creates such political realities.

crossposted at unbossed.com

You too may be waterboarded

So says John Bellinger, Senior Associate Counsel to the President and Legal Adviser to the NSC, and a close aide to Condoleezza Rice. When asked whether foreign governments could be permitted to waterboard American citizens, Bellinger declared that he couldn’t rule it out.

The logic of permitting George Bush to do whatever he wishes to suspected terrorists, regardless of the law, also means that you have lost your legal rights too. It requires that you’re no longer a citizen, but instead a subject. The American government can’t be counted on to defend your human rights because you don’t have them any longer.

Terrifying, sure, but Bellinger’s position is nothing if not rigorously logical.

The logic follows from Bellinger’s first principle, that George Bush can do no wrong. We can deduce that Bellinger takes that view from his long, ugly record of justifying and promoting Bush’s every wish. For example in 2003 he was instrumental in bending the British Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith, to Bush’s desire for war against Iraq.

On February 11, 2003, as war approached, and with Mr Blair close to panic over the legal fiasco, Goldsmith flew to the White House to meet US National Security Council legal chief, John Bellinger.

His message was clear: the US had no legal worries because Congress had already given Mr Bush the power to rule the war legal. In addition it believed there was no need for a second UN resolution.

Mr Bellinger later boasted: "We had a problem with your Attorney General who was telling us it was legally doubtful under international law. We straightened him out."

So, a State Department lawyer who cares little for international law, is Mr. Bellinger.

Mr Bellinger said the US did practice rendition, by which some terror suspects were sent to a third country to be questioned. But he added that even transferring a prisoner to a country which had been criticised over its human rights record was not a violation of international law.

"We as a state department have got problems with the human rights records of some countries... but this does not mean per se that you may not transfer a person to those countries," he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Mr Bellinger insisted that if there were such questions, the US would seek reassurances that a prisoner would not be subjected to torture. But he said some practises had been wildly exaggerated.

"Some of the allegations more broadly about all sorts of things are ludicrous, [like one] about hundreds of flights from European cities taking people to be tortured," he said.

He repeated that Washington did not condone or practise torture but would not comment on whether some prisoners had been subjected to interrogation techniques such as waterboarding - when a suspect is made to feel that they are drowning - to extract information. The lawyer said he could not comment on speculation about so-called enhanced interrogation techniques or the existence of secret prisons.

The reason Bellinger would not discuss waterboarding with the BBC is quite obviously that the BBC believes, rightly as it turns out, that waterboarding is torture.

It’s not permissible, you see, to acknowledge that the President has authorized illegal acts. Thus even when the Army banned waterboarding in its new manual, Bellinger insisted that it was not an admission that the banned practice had ever been actually practiced.

It’s worth recalling that Bellinger has threatened European leaders that they should shut up about the CIA’s spiderweb of secret prisons.

A senior U.S. administration official on Wednesday warned that ongoing inquiries into secret CIA activities in the European Union may undermine intelligence cooperation between the United States and European nations…

John Bellinger, legal adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, called the European Parliament report ''unbalanced, inaccurate and unfair'' and called on the EU governments to challenge the suggestion that Europeans need to be concerned about secret CIA flights.

''I can understand concerns about specific incidents but we should not somehow suggest that all intelligence activity is something illegal or suspicious,'' he said.

Germany, Italy and several other EU countries have been carrying out their own inquiries into secret CIA activities in Europe, probes Bellinger said ''have not been helpful with respect to necessary cooperation between the United States and Europe.''

''I do think these continuing investigations can harm intelligence cooperation, that's simply a fact of life,'' Bellinger told reporters after meeting legal advisers to EU governments in Brussels…

“We have seen many statements from European governments saying Guantanamo must be closed immediately. It's not clear how Guantanamo would be immediately closed. Europe has been prepared to criticize ... but has not been prepared to offer a constructive suggestion,'' Bellinger said.

In other words, according to Bellinger, any of Bush’s policies that come in for criticism have to become everybody’s policies…if not our allies, then at least Congress must take responsibility for his lawlessness. That’s because George W. Bush cannot be in the wrong.

In particular, Bush cannot be wrong in authorizing waterboarding. If Bush does it, then it must be legal.

Therefore since it’s permissible for Americans to waterboard foreigners, then there is no obvious basis on which to object to the waterboarding of Americans by foreign governments.

Here is Bellinger’s admission that Americans too must be subject to waterboarding, in a debate with Philippe Sands as published today by Guardian America. Before this exchange Bellinger has been playing cute, saying that he would not discuss any specific interrogation techniques and denouncing reporters for exaggerating the tendency of the US to extradite and torture people.

Philippe Sands: Are there any circumstances in which you could imagine the use of water boarding to be consistent with international law?

John Bellinger: Again, we've decided that we just don't want to get engaged in hypotheticals and applying the law to the facts of these particular cases.

Philippe Sands: Let me put it in yet another way. Could you imagine any circumstances in which the use of water boarding on an American national by a foreign intelligence service could be justified?

John Bellinger: One would have to apply the facts to the law, the law to the facts, to determine whether any technique, whatever it happened to be, would cause severe physical pain or suffering.

Philippe Sands: So you're willing to exclude any American going to the international criminal court under any circumstances, but you're not able to exclude the possibility of water boarding being used on a United States national by foreign intelligence service? I mean, that just strikes me as very curious.

John Bellinger: Well, I'm not willing to include it or exclude it, I mean, these are issues that our justice department as a matter of interpreting both the domestic law on torture and international law, has concluded that just don't want to get involved in abstract discussions of applying the law to any set of facts.

I can certainly tell you as a State Department official that it makes it very difficult to explain to the world and to provide the important assurance of what we're doing or not doing if we can't talk about intelligence activities or we can't even talk about hypotheticals.

But the decision has been made at least so far and maybe Judge Mukasey, if he's confirmed as attorney general, will make a different decision, that he would talk more about techniques. But at least, so far, the conclusion that we should not talk about specific techniques even in terms of hypotheticals.

Bellinger tries to pull a veil across his brutal admission by quibbling in the margins: He would have to know the circumstances of the waterboarding before judging whether it was acceptable; US policy has changed during Bush’s presidency and maybe it will change again to outlaw waterboarding; and gosh darn it, it’s hard to discuss waterboarding without being permitted to discuss it.

But the simple fact is that one of the government’s top lawyers is willing to permit American citizens to be waterboarded.

Of course, if foreign governments may waterboard American citizens abroad then there’s little to stop the US government from the doing the same here at home. It isn’t any longer considered torture, we’re told, and how can it be “unusual” if the entire world may practice waterboarding against any of us?

As for “cruel”, the Bush administration is never cruel.

In the case of the Convention Against Torture, our Constitution already prohibited cruel and unusual punishment, which we interpret as encompassing torture. The United States directly enforces our obligations under Article 15 of the CAT by prohibiting the use of statements obtained through torture in legal proceedings, including military commission proceedings. Congress also adopted a statute imposing criminal sanctions on persons who commit torture, consistent with our obligations under the Convention. I should add that contrary to what you might hear from some critics, no one in the United States government has sought to disregard or avoid these obligations.

Nobody, indeed. Therefore you may be waterboarded.

crossposted from unbossed.com

The Wrong Man

A jury in London delivered a verdict of guilty today in the case of the Wrong Man. Jurors imposed a staggering fine upon the Metropolitan Police. It was a bloody crime, if you ask me.

All the police did was get the Wrong Man.

The Wrong Man was an obscure young electrician who for a time lived in London. He may not have been as dark-skinned as the police let on, but he was definitely acting all nervous and twitchy.

Mr Thwaites said a conviction would have the effect of "putting handcuffs on the police". He said the prosecution should never have been brought and that Mr de Menezes was acting like a suicide bomber when he was shot.

Reportedly he was on his way to work that morning, and the Wrong Man to hold down on the train and blow his head off.

”Despite the outcome, I was very proud of them,” [the firearms team leader] said.

It was a bit of bad luck, really.

The catalogue of errors is significant.

But that is only because they shot the Wrong Man.

This cannot, nonetheless, be an excuse for what occurred on July 22, 2005, and the confused public response once it became clear…that the wrong man had been killed at Stockwell station.

Ideally it would have been better if they’d blown off the Right Man’s head, don’t you know. But the Metropolitan Police had little opportunity because the Wrong Man wasted their time with his antics.

"He was shot because when he was challenged by police he did not comply with them but reacted precisely as they had been briefed a suicide bomber might react at the point of detonating his bomb," Mr Thwaites said in his closing speech. "Furthermore, he looked like the suspect and he had behaved suspiciously."

The Met never was able to identify the Right Man.

The court heard that the firearms officers were issued with highly deadly " dum dum" bullets and told that they might have to use "new and unusual tactics" and "might have to shoot someone point blank in the head".

The Right Man would have been the one to murder, in retrospect, if you’re going to go to the trouble of blowing anybody’s head off.

No one can blame the Metroplitan Commissioner personally for the series of events that led to an innocent Brazilian being shot seven times as he sat on a Tube train.

The Wrong Man may not have complied when the police approached to kill him, though his friends and family still seem to think well of him.

The dead man's cause has been championed not only by his family and friends but a clutch of political activists who have never been sympathetic to the police…

The Wrong Man used to be named Jean, at least among the very few people who once knew him. Naturally he’s known now as the Wrong Man they shot. The name of the Right Man, of course, remains unknown.

Before considering the jury's verdict about the shooting of Jean Charles de Menezes, more than a passing thought should be offered for the 52 people killed by suicide bombers in July 2005, most of whose names remain unknown to the wider public. For terrible reasons, Mr de Menezes is the only person who died in relation to terrorism that month who is a national figure two years on.

You’d think that reporters and such, instead of focusing on the train of “tragic errors” that led to the death of the Wrong Man, would spare a thought instead for the wanton murder that’s visited without warning upon an innocent public in the name of some godforsaken “code of justice”. It’s lawlessness, there's nothing of "justice" about it.

Harriet Wistrich, solicitor for the family, said…"And what of the shoot to kill policy itself? Questions must be asked of a firearms strategy that effectively became an unstoppable machine intent on extinguishing the life of an unarmed suspect."

The verdict today was a bloody crime, I tell you.

Our former colonials know a thing or two about returning a just verdict when the government gets the Wrong Man.

Appealing to our court of finality, a German citizen, Khaled el-Masri, was asking for damages after having been abducted by the CIA in 2004 to a secret prison in Afghanistan, where he was beaten and tortured repeatedly for five months. He was suddenly released because, as German Chancellor Angela Merkel says Condoleezza Rice told her, the CIA had kidnapped the wrong man as a suspected terrorist. (We haven't even said we're sorry.)…

Yet, when the American Civil Liberties Union took el-Masri's case to the Supreme Court, not even the four justices necessary to have his case reviewed, including Stevens, said a word. The court cut el-Masri off from any chance of justice in this country, which, as the president keeps pledging, adheres to all U.S laws and international treaties.

That’s the way to treat the Wrong Man. Cut them off at the shoulder whenever they take it into their head to go to court. We’ve got to concentrate all our energies on kidnapping the Right Man next time.

crossposted from unbossed.com

British reports about secret CIA torture flights

More than two weeks ago, This World (BBC) aired a documentary on the CIA "ghost" flights that carry prisoners around the world-wide torture network. It's very impressive reporting and I think you'll want to watch it; certainly if you live in the US, you may never see programming like this. Fortunately, the video now has been posted on-line.



This link will take you to the full hour-long program. The program has also been posted in six 10-minute segments, if you prefer to view it that way. The first segment is here.

Only last weekend, one of the CIA's most notorious torture planes refueled at an RAF base in Suffolk, England (image above). Via NewsHoggers and The Agonist, I see that The Daily Mail has a detailed report on that incident.

The plane was logged arriving at RAF Mildenhall in Suffolk last weekend, and watching aviation experts said the aircraft, piloted by crew clad in desert fatigues, was immediately surrounded on the runway by armed American security forces.

Its registration number, clearly visible on the fuselage, identifies it as a plane which the European Parliament says has been involved in 'ghost flights' to smuggle terrorist suspects to shadowy interrogation centres abroad.

Records show the plane is owned by Blackwater USA, a CIA contractor described as "the most secretive and powerful mercenary army on the planet". An eyewitness, who previously worked as an RAF electronic warfare expert, said that as the plane - a CASA-212 Aviocar - taxied to a stop on the runway it was met by a US military Humvee.

The vehicle contained four US security policemen armed with M16 assault rifles, who accompanied the camouflaged crew to the airport terminal.

From Britain, the plane flew on to Malta, where it usually is stationed. The aircraft is well documented in European flight logs as one of the most active "ghost planes".

Thus the torture flights continue, and continue to use Britain as a staging area—despite the claims of the Association of Chief Police Officers that they had found no evidence of British collusion with the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program. The release of that report last week was timed to coincide with the Council of Europe report that found substantial evidence of collusion between European governments and the CIA torture network.

You'll recall too that in March McClatchy showed that as recently as January prisoners in Africa were being flown to secret prisons as part of the "extraordinary rendition" program. The news from Britain strongly suggests that the European part of the "spiderweb" remains active as well.

crossposted from Unbossed