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Never Again? DeSantis and Torture
During a press conference at the Museum of Tolerance in West Jerusalem in April, Ron DeSantis was questioned about a former detainee’s claim that as a naval attorney at Guantanamo DeSantis watched as the prisoner was force fed, something the UN regards as torture. “Do you honestly believe that’s credible? It’s 2006, I’m a junior officer, do you honestly think that they would’ve remembered me?” DeSantis responded angrily.
Mansoor Adayfi, a Yemeni citizen, was held at Guantanamo Bay for 14 years, and has told news outlets that DeSantis witnessed him being force fed during a hunger strike in 2006. Adayfi in an op-ed for Al Jazeera said “As I tried to break free, I noticed DeSantis’ handsome face among the crowd at the other side of the chain link. He was watching me struggle. He was smiling and laughing with other officers as I screamed in pain.” Two former detainees, as well as defense lawyers and base officials, have told The Washington Post DeSantis had a “close up views” of disturbing incidents at the camp during his time there.
What might DeSantis have seen? In addition to Adayfi’s account, we have Imad Abdullah Hassan’s more detailed rendition, from a man who spent twelve years in Guantanamo in a cage without ever being charged with anything. A judge cleared Hassan for release, finding there was not enough incriminating evidence to justify keeping him imprisoned (779 men were held at Guantanamo since it opened in 2002, with 12 ever charged with crimes. Only two have been convicted.) Hassan’s clearance came, yet he remained at America’s off-shore penal colony without explanation or hope of release. He went on a hunger strike in 2009 in protest (the U.S. military refers to it as a “long-term non-religious fast”), and was force-fed.
Hassan unsuccessfully sued the president of the United States, claiming the conditions under which he is being force-fed at Guantanamo are torture. The lawsuit Hassan filed describes his treatment. His description matches Adayfi’s on key details. See if you’d remember things like this:
Prisoners are strapped to a hospital bed or special restraint chair for feeding.
A funnel or bag was used to channel large amounts of liquid into the tube to feed him faster. So much liquid was forced through that the second time Hassan underwent this procedure, he lost consciousness and spent two days in critical condition.
Prisoners were simultaneously force-fed laxatives causing them to defecate on themselves as they sat in the chair being fed. “People with hemorrhoids would leave blood on the chair and the linens would not always be changed before the next feeding,” said Hassan in the lawsuit. Prisoners would be be strapped down on top of others’ stool and blood for up to two hours at a time.
Hassan was at times forcibly sedated so he could be force-fed more easily. If Hassan vomited on himself at any time during the procedure, the force-feeding would restart from the beginning.
Air-conditioning was sometimes turned up and detainees were deprived of a blanket. This was particularly difficult for the hunger strikers, as they felt the cold more than someone who was eating.
Guards would bang hunger-striking prisoners’ cells every five minutes day and night to prevent sleep. Another detainee reported when he was brought back to his cell, the guards laid him on his stomach and cause him to vomit by pressing forcefully on his back.
It was all something a young naval officer would not easily forget seeing.
But bringing up the possibility that a young Ron DeSantis witnessed some of this is disingenuous. Whether DeSantis was present or not is only of interest given his likelihood of running for president. But if he was not present, he would have heard about the torture while at Gitmo, and issued legal opinions in line with it. But whether or not DeSantis wrote such opinions is of little consequence, given the number of military and civilian personnel who certainly not only witnessed torture but performed it. Their numbers stand shallow next to their bosses who created the torture regimes, legalized them, and promulgated them, men like Bush, Obama, Cheney, and Biden. If DeSantis supported torture in his role as naval attorney at Gitmo, he was among the smallest of wheels in a very large machine to do so.
Not a single American has been punished for what happened at Guantanamo, and the first should not be Ron DeSantis.
But DeSantis is not just anyone, he is one man out of hundreds of millions in the U.S. who says he wants to be president and has a decent chance of achieving just that. So instead of speculating on what DeSantis saw, let’s instead demand from him as a candidate a statement on torture itself. Knowing what he knows now, was torture the right thing post-9/11? As president, would he support torture in the future? As president, would he seek to close Guantanamo and set the thirty prisoners still there free? We know what Trump thinks about torture, know Biden as president has made no real efforts to close Gitmo or reduce its headcount. We know what a young naval officer named DeSantis did, more or less, when faced with torture by the United States of America in the name of justice for the Republic.
Later, at various points in his career DeSantis repeatedly argued that the United States was correct in imprisoning detainees outside the legal system, and after joining Congress in 2013, he became a leading voice to keep the prison open, even though few of the detainees there were ever charged and most have been released. He has described the hunger strikes as part of a jihad against the United States, and characterized claims of abuse from detainees and their lawyers as attempts to work the system. Asked about the hunger strikes, DeSantis said in an interview in 2018 that “what I learned from that… is they are using things like detainee abuse offensively against us. It was a tactic, technique, and procedure.”
DeSantis saw what he saw; with the passing of time does he still believe in what happened in Guantanamo? Vying to be Commander-in-Chief, “I was only following orders” will not be enough. In the name of never again, we need to know what would President DeSantis do.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Gina Haspel — As if Nuremberg Never Happened
Nothing will say more about who we are — across three administrations, one who demanded torture, one who covered it up, and one who seeks to promote its bloody participants — than whether or not Gina Haspel becomes Director of the CIA.
Gina Haspel tortured human beings in Thailand as the chief of a CIA black site in 2002. She is currently Deputy Director at the CIA. With current director Mike Pompeo slated to move to Foggy Bottom, President Donald Trump proposed Haspel as the Agency’s new head.Haspel’s victims wait for death in Guantanamo and cannot speak to us, though they no doubt remember their own screams, Haspel’s face as she broke them, what she said about freedom and America as they were waterboarded. We can still hear former CIA officer John Kiriakou say “We did call her Bloody Gina. Gina was always very quick and very willing to use force. Gina and people like Gina did it, I think, because they enjoyed doing it. They tortured just for the sake of torture, not for the sake of gathering information.”
Kiriakou exposes the obsessive debate over the effectiveness of torture as false: torture works, just not for eliciting information. Torture and the people like Gina Haspel who conduct it seek vengeance, humiliation, and power. We’re just slapping you now, she would have said in that Thai prison, but we control you and who knows what will happen next, what we’re capable of? The torture victim is left to imagine what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, creating his own terror.
Haspel won’t be asked at her confirmation hearing to explain how torture works, but these men could.I met my first torture victim in Korea, where I was adjudicating visas for the State Department. Persons with serious criminal records are ineligible to travel to the United States, with an exception for political crimes by dissidents. The man I spoke with said under the U.S.-supported military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee he was tortured for writing anti-government verse. He was taken to a small underground cell. Two men arrived and beat him repeatedly on his testicles and sodomized him with one of the tools they had used for the beating. They asked no questions. They barely spoke to him at all.
Though the pain was beyond his ability to describe, he said the humiliation of being left so utterly helpless was what remained of his life, destroyed his marriage, sent him to the repeated empty comfort of alcohol, and kept him from ever putting pen to paper again. The men who destroyed him, he told me, did their work, and then departed, as if they had others to visit and needed to get on with things. He was released a few days later and driven back to his apartment by the police. A forward-looking gesture.
The second torture victim I met while stationed in Iraq. The prison that had held him was under the control of some shadowy part of the U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces. In there masked men bound him at the wrists and ankles and hung him upside-down. He said they neither asked him questions nor demanded information. They did whip his testicles with a leather strap, then beat the bottoms of his feet and the area around his kidneys. They slapped him. They broke the bones in his right foot with a steel rod, a piece of rebar ordinarily used to reinforce concrete.
It was painful, he told me, but he had felt pain before. What destroyed him was the feeling of utter helplessness. His strength had been his ability to control things. He showed me the caved in portion of his foot, which still bore a rod-like indentation with faint signs of metal grooves.
Haspel blinded one of her victims. Another was broken as a human being so thoroughly he would, at the snap of his torturer’s fingers, simply lie down to be waterboarded. Haspel accused a victim of faking his psychological breakdown: “I like the way you’re drooling. It adds to the realism. I’m almost buying it.” As head of the black site Haspel had sole authority to halt the questioning but she made the torture continue.
Gina Haspel is the same person as those who were in the rooms with the Korean, and the Iraqi.
Gina Haspel is nominated to head the CIA because Obama did not prosecute anyone for torture; she is the future he told us to look forward toward. He did not hold any truth commissions, and ensured almost all of the government documents on the torture program remain classified. He did not prosecute the CIA officials who destroyed video tapes of the torture scenes.Obama ignored, as with the continued hunting down of Nazis some 70 years after their evil acts, the message that individual responsibility must stalk those who do evil on behalf of a government. “I was only following orders” is not a defense against inhuman acts. The purpose of tracking down the guilty is to punish those with blood on their hands, to discourage the next person from doing evil, and to morally immunize a nation-state.
But to punish Gina Haspel “more than 15 years later for doing what her country asked her to do, and in response to what she was told were lawful orders, would be a travesty and a disgrace,” claims one of her supporters. “Haspel did nothing more and nothing less than what the nation and the agency asked her to do, and she did it well,” said Michael Hayden.
Influential people in Congress agree. Senator Richard Burr, chair of the Senate intelligence committee which will soon review Haspel said “I know Gina personally and she has the right skill set, experience, and judgment to lead one of our nation’s most critical agencies.” Lindsey Graham expressed “She’ll have to answer for that period of time, but I think she’s a highly qualified person.” Bill Nelson defended Haspel’s actions, saying they were “the accepted practice of the day” and shouldn’t disqualify her.
Dianne Feinstein signaled her likely acceptance, saying “Since my concerns were raised over the torture situation, I have met with her extensively, talked with her… She has been, I believe, a good deputy director.” Susan Collins added Haspel “certainly has the expertise and experience as a 30 year employee of the agency.” John McCain, a victim of torture during the Vietnam War, mumbled only that Haspel would have to explain her role.
Nearly alone at present, Senator Rand Paul says he will oppose Haspel’s nomination. Senators Ron Wyden and Martin Heinrich have told Trump she is unsuitable and will likely also vote no.
Following World War II the United States could have easily executed those Nazis responsible for the Holocaust, or simply thrown them into some forever jail on an island military base. It would have been hard to find anyone who would not have supported brutally torturing them at a black site. Instead, they were put on public trial at Nuremberg and made to defend their actions as the evidence against them was laid bare. The point was to demonstrate We were better than Them.We today instead refuse to understand what Haspel’s victims, and the Korean writer, and the Iraqi insurgent, already know on our behalf: unless our Congress awakens to confront the nightmare and deny Gina Haspel’s nomination as Director of the CIA, torture has already transformed us and so will consume us. Gina Haspel is a torturer. We are torturers. It is as if Nuremberg never happened.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
John McCain, Human Rights and Our National Mental Illness
There’s that lay definition of mental illness where you come to believe you’re the only sane person left in the room. I think that’s where I am right now.
In last week’s address to State Department employees, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson stated out loud what has been America’s foreign policy forever, the idea that basing our policy too heavily on values creates obstacles to advancing our national interests. Tillerson basically restated the Kissinger line of realpolitik, which is what the U.S. had been doing since WWII even without a snooty name to it: offering lip service to rights and human values and democracy as expedients while supporting scum bag dictators as they fit our real needs.That’s how you got the CIA overthrowing regimes in Iran and throughout Central and South America, why the U.S. supported terrible autocrats in South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, and where the roots of American backstopping of non-democratic regimes such as in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria lay. The plan was pretty clear: make nice speeches (“Women’s rights are human rights”) in China calling out America’s adversaries while doing nothing to promote those same ideals in America’s allies in places like Saudi Arabia.
But as with so many traditional American travesties that have long existed but were not spoken of pre-Trump, things are different now. And so in a full-on flag waving Op-Ed, America’s Crusty Old Man McCain uncorked a lengthy rebuttal to Tillerson’s plain speaking. McCain got in every cliche from the oldest John Wayne movies to the latest Chevy truck commercials in standing up for ‘Merica the world’s human rights policer. Here’s a taste of what he wrote:Human rights exist above the state and beyond history… They inhabit the human heart, and from there, though they may be abridged, they can never be extinguished. We are a country with a conscience. We have long believed moral concerns must be an essential part of our foreign policy, not a departure from it. We are the chief architect and defender of an international order governed by rules derived from our political and economic values. Our values are our strength and greatest treasure. We are distinguished from other countries because we are not made from a land or tribe or particular race or creed, but from an ideal that liberty is the inalienable right of mankind and in accord with nature and nature’s Creator.
Depriving the oppressed of a beacon of hope could lose us the world we have built and thrived in. It could cost our reputation in history as the nation distinct from all others in our achievements, our identity and our enduring influence on mankind. Our values are central to all three.
I can’t be the only one stunned by the irony here.
McCain’s seminal experience — surviving as a prisoner of war under torture in North Vietnam — was as part of a horrific war the U.S. waged against the agrarian nation in Vietnam for… no clear purpose. Millions of civilians were killed to “free” them, with aerial bombing taking away their rights to life in the crudest fashion. The Vietnamese people voted after WWII to become a single (Communist) nation, and the United States intervened to put a stop to that. Every single prediction of the time that was made to justify that war turned out to be wrong; Vietnam today prospers, and continues to seek ways to join closer to the world system McCain imagines the U.S. created as something akin to an act of God.
But don’t believe me. Let’s ask the relatives of those killed and maimed by America in Vietnam if they agree with McCain that “We are a country with a conscience.”After that, let’s chat up some of the Koreans tortured by the U.S.-supported dictator Chung-hee Park, or Filipinos under U.S.-supported Ferdinand Marcos, or the families of those murdered by American drones across the Mideast. Or maybe those still currently under American torture at Guantanamo. Let’s ask the ghosts of those killed by American weapons in (deep breath) Korea, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Haiti, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Chile, Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Syria, Grenada… oh, you go look up the rest. Or call John McCain’s office and ask his staff for a complete list.
And of course I’m focusing on foreign policy hypocrisy here. But America the nation of conscience practices hypocrisy at home as well. Despite being among the wealthiest nations globally, America stands alone without a comprehensive health care system. And so suffers 6.1 deaths for every 1,000 live births, higher than Hungary, Poland, the United Kingdom, and Australia. Finland and Japan had less than half the rate of the United States. America has the highest rates of incarceration in the world, and stands by as 1 out of 5 children live short of food. Americans are 10 times more likely to be killed by guns than people in other developed countries. Our elections are undemocratic mish-mashes of gerrymandering, voter fraud, foreign hackers, and the influence of massive amounts of corporate money and payoffs. America clung to slavery as a economic foundational element long after most of the world moved forward.
The truth? You can’t handle the truth. The truth is the United States maintains a bloody, warist, hypocritical record that would at least find a touch of purity in admitting we conduct our foreign policy with the greatest of self-interest. The only question left is to ask who is crazier at this point: McCain, who may believe the hogwash he is peddling, or the Americans who read it uncritically.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
For 13 Years: Torture of the Human Being Shaker Aamer by the United States
Shaker Aamer was just released, after 13 years in captivity, from Guantanamo, and returned to Britain. His wife lives there, and he has permanent residence there. He was never charged with anything by the United States, simply kept. Here is what was done to him over the course of his 13 years at Gitmo.
Bush denied, and Obama helped hide, the nasty stuff even existed, then used an ever-so-compliant media to call it all necessary for our security and very survival, then shaping dumb-cow public opinion with ersatz terms like enhanced interrogation to keep the word torture out of the discourse, then having the CIA destroy videos of the brutality, then imprisoning officials, such as John Kiriakou, who sought to expose it all, then refusing to hold hearings or conduct investigations, then employing black ops to try and derail even a cursory Senate report and finally allowing the torturers at the CIA themselves the final word on the watered-down public version of a Senate report on torture.
The Torture of Shaker Aamer by the United StatesYet, like a water leak that must find it’s way out from inside the dark place within your walls, some things become known. Now, we can read a psychiatrist’s report which includes, in detail, the torture enacted on just one prisoner of the United States, Shaker Aamer.
The once-U.S. ally Northern Alliance captured Aamer in Afghanistan and sold him to the United States as an al Qaeda member. Who knows at this point who Aamer was at that time, or what he did or did not do. If you think any of that matters, and perhaps justifies what was done to him, stop reading now. This article cannot reach you.
What was Done to One HumanIn his own words, Aamer describes the casual way his Western jailers accepted his physical presence, and skinny confessions made under Afghan torture, as all the proof necessary to imprison him in U.S. custody from 2002 until 2015. The U.S. created a world of hell that only had an entrance, not caring to conceive of an exit. In no particular order (though the full report dispassionately chronicles every act by time and location), the United States of America did the following to Aamer:
— On more than one occasion an official of the United States threatened to rape Aamer’s five year old daughter, with one interrogator describing in explicit sexual detail his plans to destroy the child;
— “Welcoming Parties” and “Goodbye Parties” as Aamer was transferred among U.S. facilities. Soldiers at these “parties” were encouraged and allowed to beat and kick detainees as their proclivities and desires dictated. Here’s a video of what a beating under the eyes of American soldiers looks like.
— Aamer was made to stand for days, not allowed to sleep for days, not allowed to use the toilet and made to shit and piss on himself for days, not fed or fed minimally for days, doused with freezing water for days, over and over again. For 13 years.
— Aamer was denied medical care as his interrogators controlled his access to doctors and made care for the wounds they inflicted dependent on Aamer’s ongoing compliance and repeated “confessions.”
— Aamer was often kept naked, and his faith exploited to humiliate him in culturally-specific ways. He witnessed a 17-year-old captive of America sodomized with a rifle, and was threatened with the same.
— At times the brutality took place for its own sake, disconnected from interrogations. At times it was the centerpiece of interrogation.
— The torture of Aamer continued at Gitmo, for as an occasional hunger striker he was brutally force-fed.
Torture WorksThe obsessive debate in this country over the effectiveness of torture rings eternally false: torture does indeed work. Torture is invariably about shame and vengeance, humiliation, power, and control, not gathering information. Even when left alone (especially when left alone) the torture victim is punished to imagine what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, almost always in the process assuming responsibility for creating his own terror.
And there you have the take-away point, as briefers in Washington like to say. The real point of the torture was to torture. Over twelve years, even the thinnest rationale that Aamer was a dangerous terrorist, or had valuable information to disclose, could not exist and his abusers knew it. The only goal was to destroy Shaker Aamer.
The combination of raw brutality, the careful, educated use of medical doctors to fine-tune the pain, the skills of psychiatrists and cultural advisors to enhance the impact of what was done worked exactly as it was intended. According to the psychiatrist who examined Aamer in detail at Guantanamo, there is little left of the man. He suffers from a broad range of psychiatric and physical horrors. In that sense, by the calculus his torturers employ, the torture was indeed successful.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan failed at great cost, al Qaeda has been reborn in Africa and greater parts of the Middle East and the U.S. has willingly transformed itself into at best a bully abroad, and a police state at home. But no mind; the full force and credit of the United States of America destroyed Shaker Aamer as revenge for all the rest, bloody proof of all the good we failed to do.
Never Again, Always AgainDespite the horrors of World War II, the mantra– never again– becomes today a sad joke. The scale is different this time, what, 600? 6000? men destroyed by torture not six million, but not the intent. The desire to inflict purposeful suffering by government order, the belief that such inhuman actions are legal, even necessary, differs little from one set of fascists to more modern ones. Given the secrecy the Nazis enjoyed for years, how full would the American camps be today? Kill them all, and let God sort them out is never far from the lips.
Torture does not leave its victims, nor does it leave a nation that condones it. The ghosts don’t disappear the way the flesh and bone can be made to go away.
The people who did this, whether the ones in the torture cell using their fists, or the ones in the White House ordering it with their pens, walk free among us. They’ll never see justice done. There will be no Nuremberg Trials for America’s evils, just a collapsing bunker in Berlin. But unlike Shaker Aamer, you are sentenced to live to see it forever in your nightmares.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Destruction of Tariq Ba Odah by the United States of America
Tariq Ba Odah has been convicted of nothing.
He has nonetheless spent 13 years inside Guantanamo living in a cage, and he is dying. The United States refuses to release him. He now weighs only 75 pounds.
So you know, the photo here shows an American POW from WWII who weighed 75 pounds.
A lawyer for Tariq Ba Odah has asked a federal judge to order his release because of his “severe physical and psychological deterioration.” On Friday, for the third time, the Justice Department asked a judge to extend its deadline to respond, saying the administration needed another week “to further consider internally its response to petitioner’s motion.”Tariq Ba Odah, in Guantanamo with no trial and no conviction and no hope of release otherwise accordingly, has been on a hunger strike since 2007 and now weighs less than 75 pounds. He is living testimony that the United States continues to torture its enemies. He is living testimony that the United States fears 75 pound men.
So you know, the photo here shows people from a WWII concentration camp who weighed 75 pounds.
Tariq Ba Odah has been held in Guantanamo for more than 13 years. The Pakistani Army captured him along the Afghan border, and he is accused of having gone to the region to fight with the Taliban and of having received some weapons training.
In his U.S. government file, he is “assessed” to have been an Islamic extremist and a “possible member” of al Qaeda. It says he “probably” manned a mortar at Tora Bora in Afghanistan. He is “reported” to have been an “important man” with al Qaeda. The file notes that he watching videos on TV about the bombing of the USS Cole, information worth including apparently.
It seems incongruous that an important man in al Qaeda would have the job of mortarman.
It is likely that tens of thousands of young men, maybe more, fought and continue to fight against the United States in Afghanistan. Only a handful are in Guantanamo. Vengeance 14 years after 9/11 is impersonal and arbitrary and thus somehow even more evil.
So you know, the photo here shows a dog that has been starved to the edge of death.
As far as releasing Tariq Ba Odah, the New York Times reports State Department officials say that the government should not oppose his release, citing his medical condition and the incongruity of sending American diplomats to ask other countries to take in such detainees even as the Justice Department fights in court to prolong their detention.
But Defense Department officials say that not contesting Ba Odah’s lawsuit would create an incentive for other detainees to stop eating, causing problems at the military-run prison. Justice Department litigators, who the Times claims have the job of “defend[ing] the government’s authority, are also fighting Ba Odah’s petition.
Why do educated men and women at the Department of Justice, cognizant of the irony of their actions given the name of where they work, do this? They’ll say, perhaps to themselves in some death-bed moment of desperate remorse, that they were only following orders. One hopes their god is more understanding, because we have heard that one before at Nuremberg.
Despite continued forcing of food up Ba Odah’s anus or down into his stomach against his will and under restraint, Ba Odah appears to have developed an underlying medical problem that is preventing his body from properly absorbing nutrition no matter how much he is force-fed. The U.S. continues to force-feed him nonetheless.
At this point someone will be asking: why doesn’t Ba Odah just eat?
It is likely Ba Odah himself has thought about the same question. In my former career working for the Department of State, I was responsible for the welfare of arrested Americans abroad. Many threatened hunger strikes for reasons ranging from superficial to very serious. However, in my 24 years of such work, only one prisoner carried it out for more than a day or two, taking only small sips of water for a week. His captors, one of America’s closest allies in Asia, choose to not force-feed him, stating due to the nature of his “political crime” (espionage) that they’d prefer to see him die.
During my daily visits I watched the man starve to death in real-time. It requires extraordinary will and strength to do that, pushing back against all of evolution and biology screaming inside your head to just eat. Close to death, the man choose to stay alive and eat for the sake of his family. It is no casual decision to do what Tariq Ba Odah is doing. Something very important must be at stake for a man to do what Tariq Ba Odah has done.
For eight years.
And for those who have trouble with the images, I’ll suggest you not support the politicians and policies that create them. And just because you don’t look at them, that doesn’t make them go away for the real people in Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Today is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture
Today is the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture.In honor of the victims and with hatred for the torturers, including the United States of America, I am re-running an older article that speaks to the real horrors of what has been and is being done to other human beings.
There’s one particular nightmare that Americans need to face: in the first decade of the twenty-first century we tortured people as national policy. One day, we’re going to have to confront the reality of what that meant, of what effect it had on its victims and on us, too, we who condoned, supported, or at least allowed it to happen, either passively or with guilty (or guiltless) gusto. If not, torture won’t go away. It can’t be disappeared like the body of a political prisoner, or conveniently deep-sixed simply by wishing it elsewhere or pretending it never happened or closing our bureaucratic eyes. After the fact, torture can only be dealt with by staring directly into the nightmare that changed us — that, like it or not, helped make us who we now are.
The president, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has made it clear that no further investigations or inquiries will be made into America’s decade of torture. His Justice Department failed to prosecute a single torturer or any of those who helped cover up evidence of the torture practices. But it did deliver a jail sentence to one ex-CIA officer who refused to be trained to torture and was among the first at the CIA to publicly admit that the torture program was real.
At what passes for trials at our prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, disclosure of the details of torture is forbidden, effectively preventing anyone from learning anything about what the CIA did with its victims. We are encouraged to do what’s best for America and, as Barack Obama put it, “look forward, not backward,” with the same zeal as, after 9/11, we were encouraged to save America by going shopping.
Looking into the Eyes of the Tortured
Torture does not leave its victims, nor does it leave a nation that condones it. As an act, it is all about pain, but even more about degradation and humiliation. It destroys its victims, but also demeans those who perpetrate it. I know, because in the course of my 24 years as a State Department officer, I spoke with two men who had been tortured, both by allies of the United States and with at least the tacit approval of Washington. While these men were tortured, Americans in a position to know chose to look the other way for reasons of politics. These men were not movie characters, but complex flesh-and-blood human beings. Meet just one of them once and, I assure you, you’ll never follow the president’s guidance and move forward trying to forget.
The Korean Poet
The first victim was a Korean poet. I was in Korea at the time as a visa officer working for the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. Persons with serious criminal records are normally ineligible to travel to the United States. There is, however, an exception in the law for political crimes. It was initially carved out for Soviet dissidents during the Cold War years. I spoke to the poet as he applied for a visa to determine if his arrest had indeed been “political” and so not a disqualification for his trip to the U.S.
Under the brutal military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee, the poet was tortured for writing anti-government verse. To younger Americans, South Korea is the land of “Gangnam Style,” of fashionable clothing and cool, cool electronics. However, within Psy’s lifetime, his nation was ruled by a series of military autocrats, supported by the United States in the interest of “national security.”
The poet quietly explained to me that, after his work came to the notice of the powers that be, he was taken from his apartment to a small underground cell. Soon, two men arrived and beat him repeatedly on his testicles and sodomized him with one of the tools they had used for the beating. They asked him no questions. In fact, he said, they barely spoke to him at all. Though the pain was beyond his ability to describe, even as a poet, he said that the humiliation of being left so utterly helpless was what remained with him for life, destroyed his marriage, sent him to the repeated empty comfort of alcohol, and kept him from ever putting pen to paper again.
The men who destroyed him, he told me, entered the room, did their work, and then departed, as if they had many others to visit that day and needed to get on with things. The Poet was released a few days later and politely driven back to his apartment by the police in a forward-looking gesture, as if the episode of torture was over and to be forgotten.
The Iraqi Tribal Leader
The second torture victim I met while I was stationed at a forward operating base in Iraq. He was a well-known SOI leader. The SOI, or Sons of Iraq, were Sunni tribesmen who, as part of Iraq War commander General David Petraeus’s much-discussed “Anbar Awakening” agreed to stop killing Americans and, in return for money we paid them, take up arms against al-Qaeda. That was 2007. By 2010, when I met the man, the Sons of Iraq, as Sunnis, had no friends in the Shia-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad and the U.S. was expediently allowing its Sunni friendships to fade away.
Over dessert one sticky afternoon, the SOI leader told me that he had recently been released from prison. He explained that the government had wanted him off the street in the run-up to a recent election, so that he would not use his political pull to get in the way of a Shia victory. The prison that held him was a secret one, he told me, under the control of some shadowy part of the U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces.
He had been tortured by agents of the Maliki government, supported by the United States in the interest of national security. Masked men bound him at the wrists and ankles and hung him upside-down. He said that they neither asked him any questions nor demanded any information. They whipped his testicles with a leather strap, then beat the bottoms of his feet and the area around his kidneys. They slapped him. They broke the bones in his right foot with a steel rod, a piece of rebar that would ordinarily have been used to reinforce concrete.
It was painful, he told me, but he had felt pain before. What truly wounded him was the feeling of utter helplessness. A man like himself, he stated with an echo of pride, had never felt helpless. His strength was his ability to control things, to stand up to enemies, to fight, and if necessary, to order men to their deaths. Now, he no longer slept well at night, was less interested in life and its activities, and felt little pleasure. He showed me his blackened toenails, as well as the caved in portion of his foot, which still bore a rod-like indentation with faint signs of metal grooves. When he paused and looked across the room, I thought I could almost see the movie running in his head.
Alone in the Dark
I encountered those two tortured men, who described their experiences so similarly, several years and thousands of miles apart. All they really had in common was being tortured and meeting me. They could, of course, have been lying about, or exaggerating, what had happened to them. I have no way to verify their stories because in neither country were their torturers ever brought to justice. One man was tortured because he was considered a threat to South Korea, the other to Iraq. Those “threatened” governments were among the company the U.S. keeps, and they were known torturers, regularly justifying such horrific acts, as we would also do in the first years of the twenty-first century, in the name of security. In our case, actual torture techniques would reportedly be demonstrated to some of the highest officials in the land in the White House itself, then “legalized,” and carried out in global “black sites” and foreign prisons.
A widely praised movie about the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, opens with a series of torture scenes. The victims are various Muslims and al-Qaeda suspects, and the torturers are members of the U.S. government working for the CIA. We see a prisoner strapped to the wall, bloody, with his pants pulled down in front of a female CIA officer. We see another having water poured into his mouth and lungs until he wretches in agony (in what during the Middle Ages was bluntly called “the Water Torture,” later “the water cure,” or more recently “waterboarding”). We see men shoved forcibly into tiny confinement boxes that do not allow them to sit, stand, or lie down.
These are were among the techniques of torture “lawfully” laid out in a CIA Inspector General’s report, some of which would have been alarmingly familiar to the tortured men I spoke with, as they might be to Bradley Manning, held isolated, naked, and without sleep in U.S. military prisons in a bid to break his spirit.
The movie scenes are brutal, yet sanitized. As difficult to watch as the images are, they show nothing beyond the infliction of pain. Horrific as it may be, pain fades, bones mend, bruises heal. No, don’t for a second think that the essence of torture is physical pain, no matter what Zero Dark Thirty implies. If, in many cases, the body heals, mental wounds are a far more difficult matter. Memory persists.
The obsessive debate in this country over the effectiveness of torture rings eternally false: torture does indeed work. After all, it’s not just about eliciting information — sometimes, as in the case of the two men I met, it’s not about information at all. Torture is, however, invariably about shame and vengeance, humiliation, power, and control. We’re just slapping you now, but we control you and who knows what will happen next, what we’re capable of? “You lie to me, I hurt you,” says a CIA torturer in Zero Dark Thirty to his victim. The torture victim is left to imagine what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, almost always in the process assuming responsibility for creating his own terror. Yes, torture “works” — to destroy people.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, accused 9/11 “mastermind,” was waterboarded 183 times. Al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj spent six years in the Guantanamo Bay prison, stating, “They used dogs on us, they beat me, sometimes they hung me from the ceiling and didn’t allow me to sleep for six days.” Brandon Neely, a U.S. military policeman and former Guantanamo guard, watched a medic there beat an inmate he was supposed to treat. CIA agents tortured a German citizen, a car salesman named Khaled el-Masri, who was picked up in a case of mistaken identity, sodomizing, shackling, and beating him, holding him in total sensory deprivation, as Macedonian state police looked on, so the European Court of Human Rights found last week.
Others, such as the Court of Human Rights or the Senate Intelligence Committee, may give us glimpses into the nightmare of official American policy in the first years of this century. Still, our president refuses to look backward and fully expose the deeds of that near-decade to sunlight; he refuses to truly look forward and unambiguously renounce forever the use of anything that could be seen as an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Since he also continues to support robustly the precursors to torture — the “extraordinary rendition” of captured terror suspects to allied countries that are perfectly happy to torture them and indefinite detention by decree — we cannot fully understand what men like the Korean poet and the Iraqi tribal leader already know on our behalf: we are torturers and unless we awaken to confront the nightmare of what we are continuing to become, it will eventually transform and so consume us.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Child, Imprisoned by U.S. in Guantánamo at Age 15, Granted Bail in Canada
History will remember us, but not well, and not as good and as just.
For we were the most powerful nation on earth, and we imprisoned a child named Omar Khadr in an off-shore penal colony, in the 21st century.
Omar Khadr in Canada
A Canadian court ordered on April 24 that Omar Khadr, the only Canadian to have been imprisoned at Guantánamo, be released on bail after 13 years in that shameful place. Khadr was thrown into Gitmo at age 15.
In 2010, eight years after his imprisonment commenced, Khadr pleaded guilty before a military commission to killing an American soldier with a grenade in 2002 during a battle in Afghanistan that also left Khadr severely wounded. Khadr is now 28, having spent the latter half of his childhood in an American prison.
Khadr was returned to Canada in 2012 to serve the remainder of the sentence the United States imposed, after he had already served eight years. He is now in a prison in Alberta. Another hearing at the Court of Queen’s Bench will determine when he will be released and will set conditions. The decision noted that the Canadian government challenged evidence that Khadr had been a model prisoner and that he was a “strong candidate” for release. Canada’s Conservative government had been reluctant to accept Khadr now that the U.S. is doing some housecleaning in Gitmo. Canada’s public safety minister said the government would appeal the bail decision. It is unclear whether or not that step will bar Khadr’s release.
Prisoner at GitmoThe Canadians knew about Khadr.
In fact, they interviewed him in Guantanamo in 2003, observed by his American jailers. Khadr was just 16 then, and cried during the session. The Canadians told the kid that “we know who [your father] is… he is a lost cause.” Khadr responded “He didn’t do anything” and the Canadian interrogators moved on to question him about his brother, his mother and the whereabouts of other family members. Khadr mentioned his education had ended with 8th grade, and said he was forced into fighting in Afghanistan, something that sounds about right from a 15-year-old. He claimed his earlier confessions to his American jailers were false, that he just told them what they wanted to hear, again about right for a 15-year-old being questioned at length by professional interrogators, but you never know with these people, right?
According to a report by his Canadian government interrogators, “In an effort to make him more amenable and willing to talk,” [Redacted] has placed Omar on the frequent flyer program: for the three weeks before [Redacted’s] visit, Omar has not been permitted more than three hours in any one location. At three hours intervals he is moved to another cell block, thus denying him uninterrupted sleep and a continued change of neighbors. He will soon be placed in isolation for up to three weeks and then he will be interviewed again.” The Canadian writer cheerfully commented “He did not yawn or indicate in any way that he was tired throughout the two-hour interview. It seems likely that the natural resilience of a well-fed and healthy seventeen-year old are keeping him going.”
The Canadians gave him some food from McDonald’s and his first mail since arriving at Gitmo.
An Eye for an Eye
An American soldier wounded by Khadr 13 years ago is clear on his beliefs. “I’m a Western-civilization Christian,” said now-retired Green Beret Layne Morris. “I’ve been raised with the knowledge that people can and do change and improve themselves. I think most of us are trying to do that. But some people aren’t, and Omar Khadr has chosen a path which dictates that, as a result of his religion, he’s got to go to war against our society. Until he changes from that attitude, I’m not sure why we should turn him loose to wreak havoc on our friends and families and neighbors again.”
The retired Green Beret also has his own thoughts about his wearing a uniform while Khadr did not. “We have a long history of going to war with people who have answered the call from their country. And then when it’s over we’re able to sit down with our former enemies, shake hands and say, ‘we tried our best to kill each other but our countries are at peace now.’ But Omar Khadr hasn’t earned that status. He didn’t put on the uniform of his country. He trashed his country.”
It all makes sense, at least to retired Green Beret Layne Morris. He was blinded in Khadr’s attack, so an eye for eye seems a fair way to describe his feelings 13 years later.
Whose War?
Now somewhere out there is a reader who is saying “But the little bastard killed an American soldier. He deserved to be punished.” Maybe so. Justice is a tricky thing. But no American soldier was punished in Afghanistan for killing on the battlefield, and two presidents of the most powerful nation on earth were never punished for using drones to kill children.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Federal Judge Says U.S. Must Release Abu Ghraib Photos
The few photos publicly seen of the abuses American soldiers committed inside the Abu Ghraib prison are only a tiny portion of the whole (former Senator Joe Lieberman said in 2009 that there were nearly 2,100 more photographs.)
The photos, such as the ones you see here, were released by a whistleblower. A significant number of photos, said to show acts of sodomy and brutality far worse than what is already known, have been kept from the public by the U.S. government for eleven years now, ostensibly to protect American forces from retaliation. Since the American Civil Liberties Union first filed a lawsuit against the government in 2004 seeking the release of the photographs, the government has been successful in blocking them. That may — may — change.
A federal judge ruled March 20 that the U.S. government must release photographs showing the treatment of detainees in U.S. custody at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and other sites. However, Judge Alvin Hellerstein in Manhattan ruled that his order would not take effect for 60 days to give the U.S. Department of Defense time to decide whether to appeal.
“The photos are crucial to the public record,” ACLU’s deputy legal director said. “They’re the best evidence of what took place in the military’s detention centers, and their disclosure would help the public better understand the implications of some of the Bush administration’s policies.”
Keep in mind Hellerstein first ordered the government to turn over the photographs in 2005, but while that order was being appealed, Congress passed a law allowing the Secretary of Defense to withhold the photographs by certifying their release would endanger U.S. citizens. Then remember Hellerstein already ruled last August that the government had failed to show why releasing the photographs would endanger American soldiers and workers abroad, but then immediately gave the government until March 20 a chance to submit more evidence. The judge’s most recent order said the additional evidence had failed to change his decision. Yet Hellerstein has still left open a further appeal.
Meanwhile, the horrors of Abu Ghraib done in our names, and well-known to the Iraqi victims, remain shielded from only the American public by their own government.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Senator Mark Udall: Disclose the Full Torture Report
As a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, I am proud to post this appeal from our group for Senator Mark Udall to release the full text of the Senate Torture Report.
Senator Mark Udall has called for the full release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on torture. However, as a still-sitting member of Congress, he has a constitutional protection to read most of the still-secret report on the Senate floor — and a group of intelligence veterans urges him to do just that.
We, the undersigned are veteran intelligence officers with a combined total of over 300 years of experience in intelligence work. We send you this open letter at what seems to be the last minute simply because we had been hoping we would not have to.
You seem on the verge of leaving the Senate without letting your fellow Americans know all they need to know about CIA torture. In the eight weeks since you lost your Senate seat you gave off signs that, during your last days in office, you would provide us with a fuller account of this sordid chapter in our country’s history, exercising your right to immunity under the “Speech or Debate” clause in Article 1 of the Constitution.
Your rhetoric against torture and in defense of the Constitution has been strong, but we now sense a white flag beneath it. We fear you intend to silently steal away, and thus deny the American people their last best chance to learn what they need to know about the record of CIA torture.
We had been encouraged by your December 10 speech on the Senate floor, in which you referred to the release of the Executive Summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Study on CIA torture the previous day and said: “My goal is to ensure the full truth comes out about this grim time in the history of the CIA and our nation, so that neither the CIA nor any future administration repeats the grievous mistake this important oversight work reveals.” (our emphasis)
Very quickly, though, your goal became fuzzier. When Scott Raab of Esquire Magazine asked you right after your speech, “Do you think the remaining 6,000 or so pages will become public?” You answered: “I do. It’s my fervent hope that they will be declassified. I will continue to call for the entire report to be declassified. The details are important … the entire report ought to be released.”
With all due respect, Senator, exactly who do you think is going to do that, if not you? Was your “goal to ensure the full truth comes out” more rhetoric than reality? We are extremely disappointed at your apparent readiness to throw in the towel.
You had told Raab on November 21, “What happened [the torture, lying, and cover-up] broke faith with the Constitution,” adding, “There are some that would like this report [the Senate Intelligence Committee Study] never to see the light of day. There are some that are running out the clock.” Clearly, you are on to their game. Are you going to let the clock run out, when what we actually need is a full-court press?
A Fine Floor SpeechYou called, again, for CIA Director John Brennan to resign, while at the same time noting that President Obama has expressed full confidence in him and has “demonstrated that trust by making no effort at all to rein him in.” In your words, the CIA keeps “posing impediments or obstacles” to full disclosure of its “barbaric program” of torture. And you made light of Obama’s merely stating, “Hopefully, we don’t do it again in the future.”
“That’s not good enough,” you added, and of course you are right. Finally, you complain: “If there’s no real leadership from the White House helping the public understand that the CIA’s torture program wasn’t necessary and didn’t save lives or disrupt terrorist plots, then what’s to stop the next White House and CIA director from supporting torture? …
“The CIA has lied to its overseers and the public, destroyed and tried to hold back evidence, spied on the Senate, made false charges against our staff, and lied about torture and the results of torture. And no one has been held to account. … There are right now people serving at high-level positions at the agency who approved, directed, or committed acts related to the CIA’s detention and interrogation program.”
QED – as you have demonstrated – there is no “real leadership” in the White House on this transcendentally important issue.
Thus, it struck us as disingenuous to finish, as you do, with a glaring non sequitur. You call on our timid President to “purge his administration” of a CIA director in whom he says he has “full confidence,” together with the torture alumni and alumnae still tenaciously protected by the same director.
Again, with all due respect, it seems equally disingenuous to appeal to this President to declassify and release the earlier review ordered by former CIA Director Leon Panetta, the conclusions of which directly refute several of Brennan’s claims – much less release the full 6,800-page study of which we are permitted only a heavily redacted “executive summary.”
You even include Panetta’s own observation that President Obama and Brennan both were unhappy with Panetta’s initial agreement with the committee to allow staff access to operational cables and other sensitive documents about the torture program.
So where is the real leadership going to come from? Clearly, not from the White House. Russian President Putin is going to give Crimea to NATO before Obama does any of the things you suggested. And you know it.
So where could the initiative come from in these final days before the Senate changes hands? Frankly, Senator Udall, we had been counting on you rising to the challenge before this unique opportunity is lost, probably forever.
Where We Are Coming FromWe are, frankly, at a loss to explain your hesitancy – your lack of follow-through toward your stated goal “to ensure the full truth comes out … so that neither the CIA nor any future administration repeats the grievous mistake [of torture].”
If you summon the courage to discharge what you no doubt realize is your duty, there is no way you will end up in jail. Indeed, this is precisely the kind of situation the Founders had in mind when they wrote the “Speech or Debate” clause into Article 1 of the Constitution.
Whatever it is that you fear, you might keep in mind that several of us – who lack the immunity you enjoy – have paid and continue to pay a heavy price for exposing lies, injustice, and abuses like torture. One of us – the first to reveal that those grisly kinds of torture (aka “enhanced interrogation techniques”) were approved at the highest level of government – is in prison serving a 30-month sentence. A number of us have seen the inside of prisons for doing the right thing; and all of us know what it feels like to be shunned by former colleagues.
Also important, despite our many years of service as senior intelligence officers and our solid record for accuracy, we are effectively banned from the so-called “mainstream media,” which continues to prefer the role of security-state accomplice in disparaging, for example, the findings of the Senate Intelligence Committee Study. (Never mind that the study is based on indisputably original CIA cables and other documents.) In contrast, you are not banned from the media – yet. You have a few more days; you need to use them.
In your “Additional Views” on the Senate committee Study released on Dec. 9, you applaud Sen. Dianne Feinstein “for seeing this project to completion.” But wait. You are surely aware (1) that the project remains far from complete; and (2) that if you or one of your Senate colleagues do not move tout suite to release the full Study together with the earlier review commissioned by Panetta, the “project” will not be brought to “completion” any time soon – unless a courageous whistleblower runs great risk and does what you can do with impunity.
Moreover, releasing the report, as you have the authority to do under the Constitution, would publicly demonstrate that at least one legal method of whistleblowing does exist. So when such truly illegal actions occur, even at the most senior levels, there is a way of righting wrongs.
You are correct to call the committee Study “one of the most significant examples of oversight in the history of the U.S. Senate.” We imagine that the strong support you and Sen. Ron Wyden gave Sen. Feinstein helped make it so. And we join you both in applauding Sen. Feinstein’s tenacity in getting the Study’s 500-page executive summary released. John Brennan used every conceivable ruse to slow-roll and eviscerate the summary, but Sen. Feinstein faced him down. She achieved all she could, given the circumstances. But the project remains far from “completion.”
In your “Additional Views” you note that, as a new member of the intelligence committee four years ago, you were “deeply disturbed to learn specifics about the flaws in the [torture] program, the misrepresentations, the brutality.” You add that you wrote the President letters about this in May, June, and July of this year. Surely the lack of response told you something. Please – not another letter to Obama. You need to go beyond letters.
Your TurnNow it’s your turn, Senator Udall. Put Constitution and conscience into play, together with the immunity you enjoy. You can – and, in our view, your oath to the Constitution dictates that you must – rise to the occasion and find a way to release the entire 6,800-page Study, including CIA’s comments (but not redacted to a fare-thee-well). You need to put this at the very top of your job jar – now, before it is too late.
The American people are owed the truth. As you have noted more than once, they are not likely to get it from Brennan – or the President for that matter. Nor will it come from the mainstream media with their customary “on-the-one-hand-and-then-on-the-other” approach to journalism. Polling data on the widespread acceptance of using torture “to keep us safe” is a direct result of that kind of coverage – as well as of the artful crafting of words and phrases in the questions asked in those surveys.
The comments of the many of the TV talking-torture heads seem almost designed to discourage viewers from reading the damning executive summary itself. Who wants to read such abhorrent stuff at Christmastime, anyway?
If those who approved and conducted torture are not held accountable, torture is a virtual certainty for the future. In that sense, you are quite right in saying that the Committee staff has done “seminal” work. The seeds have been sown for reining in an executive agency acting lawlessly; or, alternatively, for endorsing, out of fear, the practice of torture in the future.
John Brennan, those who were in the CIA chain of command for torture, and the co-opted lawyers and faux-psychologists who lent their needed skills to the enterprise may be a bit nervous over the next few days until you are safely gone. But there is little sign they actually expect you to rise to the challenge.
Indeed, Brennan and Co. seem intent on advertising their power and impunity by recently leaking the latest demonstration of lack of accountability. Surprise, surprise: the panel appointed by Brennan to investigate Brennan and his people for hacking into Senate Intelligence Committee computers has reportedly decided to hold no one accountable, including Brennan himself, who initially lied about it. Now we learn that he apparently authorized the hacking in the first place, so everyone involved receives a stay-out-of-jail-free card. Smug impunity needs to be challenged using your immunity.
Finally, Senator Udall, history books will record the release of the highly redacted summary of the five-year-in-the-making Senate report on torture. It will also record whether or not the Senate rose – even if only in the form of a single, un-intimidated man, to expose truly and in fullness what was done in the name of the American people. Our history is replete with such individual acts of courage by Americans who put country before self. Will you join them?
For the Steering Group, Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS)William Binney, former Technical Director, World Geopolitical & Military Analysis, NSA; co-founder, SIGINT Automation Research Center (ret.)
Thomas Drake, Defense Intelligence Senior Executive Service, NSA (resigned)
Daniel Ellsberg, former State Dept. & Defense Dept. Official (VIPS Associate)
Mike Gravel, former Senator from Alaska; former Army intelligence officer
Larry Johnson, CIA analyst & State Department/counterterrorism, (ret.)
John Kiriakou, former CIA counterterrorism operations officer; federal prison, Loretto, Pennsylvania
Edward Loomis, former Chief, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA
David MacMichael, USMC & National Intelligence Council (ret.)
Ray McGovern, Army Infantry/Intelligence officer & CIA presidential briefer (ret.)
Elizabeth Murray, Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Middle East (ret.)
Todd Pierce, MAJ, U.S. Army Judge Advocate (ret.)
Coleen Rowley, Minneapolis Division Counsel & Special Agent, FBI (ret.)
Peter Van Buren, Department of State, Foreign Service Officer (ret.)
Kirk Wiebe, Senior Analyst, SIGINT Automation Research Center, NSA (ret.)
Ann Wright, Col., US Army (ret); Foreign Service Officer (ret.)
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Christmas in the White House Basement
Hold the fat bastard down!Answer me punk! Is it true that you give toys to every child in the world? Even the ones whose moms and dads are terrorists?
Hah, that’s material support. Hit him with the electric shock.
Do you refuse to hand over the naughty or nice list for us to use in drone targeting? Tell me, do it now!
He won’t answer. Let’s anally feed him again.
My turn, my turn.
No, you did it last time.
Alfreda! Cheney! Stop fighting. Look at his jolly, round belly like bowl full of jelly. He’ll need plenty of anal feedings. There’ll be time for everyone.
I wanna use the candy cane on him.
No, no, chestnuts!
Alright, if you won’t cooperate old St. Nick, we’re going to rape a loved one in front of you. That should loosen your tongue. Bring in Rudolph.
Cheney, get off the damn reindeer. We’re only threatening to do that this year.
Damn reindeer was asking for it. Lookit the way she prances around with that saucy red nose.
Now old man, we’ll shave off your beard. I think that offends his North Pole religion.
And blast him with the music. No, no, not more Nine Inch Nails. Hit him with the ten minute Christmas song loop they play over and over while you’re in line for 40 minutes at Walmart.
Hey, who wants egg nog?
Feinstein, you came! We invited you again this year of course, but I never expected you to show up after everyone caught you with Brennan in the supply closet. I bet that hurt. It is good to see that whatever the CIA does to you, you are never fully humiliated.
Well, it is the season to be jolly.
So, everyone, gather round, Barack is about to waterboard Santa.
Aw, he always gets to do that first.
Now, now, boys, you all know you’re not spending this Christmas in jail because of Barack, so show some respect. Anyway, we’ll move the mistletoe over the waterboarding table and everyone will get a chance to torture Santa. Sheik Khalid Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times before he was made insane for freedom, so Santa will be screaming with us for a long time.
After that, can we watch the tapes again? Please?
Well, OK, Condi, one more time. Uncle Jose brought his own copies of the torture tapes again this year —
You said the T word, you said the T word! Five dollars into the jar.
Ugh, OK. Anyway, Uncle Jose brought the, er, enhanced interrogation tapes for us all to enjoy — really, Jose, you shouldn’t have — but after that, it is right to bed for everyone. We have to render Santa all around the world, to every country that tortures so they can all have a “crack” at the bastard, in just one night. Even with an early start, that takes some Christmas magic!
Hey, wasn’t Jesus tortured to death in a way?
You’re right, He was. Why, we’re putting the Christ right back into Christmas!
God bless torturers and those who support them, everyone!
Honey, I don’t know how you do it, but every year it just gets better.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
America, the Boxer
Today’s guest post is reprinted by permission from the Facebook page of one Rick Sullivan. I don’t know Rick except via Facebook, but here he eloquently sums up an awful lot of what I, and perhaps others, have been thinking.
When a nation comes through back to back tectonic events like the depression and WWII, when they stand on the brink of total annihilation for half a century ready to spring into WWIII at a moment’s notice, when most of our wealth goes to building that umbrella of defense for the world while it rebuilds and invests in their populations, to have that role suddenly snatched away and made irrelevant inside of just a few years, they will clamor for any opportunity to jump back into that role.We’re like an aging fighter who spent his life focused solely on being the master of his craft but now has no more bouts to fight. He suddenly finds himself faced with the prospect learning to be a real husband and a father. He looks for any opportunity to be his old self and have relevance with his himself and his family again, to prove he is still the man who will fight to protect them. So he finds any reason he can to come unglued and pummel the first poor sap to cross him in the slightest way.
Just like him, we no longer have meaning and relevance in this world or with our family. Who will we become? The humbled old man who learns and follows his heart? Or the bitter old curmudgeon who’s family abandoned him long ago for their own survival and happiness?
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
You Can Play the Home Torture Game
Jealous that CIA torturers get all the fun? Want to virtually torture someone right from your own desktop? Want to encourage your kids to see torture as fun and help desensitize them? Why not play the torture game, your very own torture simulator!
Torture Game 3 is the most up-to-date version of the popular bloody game (rated 8/10!) where you use different tools to torture the victim. You can cut the hands off the victim using a chainsaw saw, you can use a pistol or a shotgun to blow holes in the body, you can even break the body parts apart from the body itself.My favorite: using the Spike tool to tear off flesh.
The variety of torture tools that can be found on the right side of the “action border panel” is robust. Why, there’s something for everyone. The most popular tools include ropes, a knife, a shotgun, a razor and of course the chainsaw. While the game loads with a generic male victim’s image, the designers explain you can upload any picture — even your own! — and torture a man or woman you hate.
The game designers promise “this game is a good way how to spend several minutes after a difficult day.”
Here’s the link. The game is NSFW. The game runs under Adobe Flash, so you need that on your computer, but otherwise no download is necessary; the game runs right in your browser. There is no cost, no ads, no sign up. Just hit the link and torture. And it is all nice and legal, just like in real life.
I wish to God this was satire, but it is not. We are a sick, sick people. But have fun!
My “thanks” to alert commenter Pitch for the tip on this game!
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Torture and the Company We Keep
A new poll finds majority of Americans — 59 percent — believe torture was justified after the 9/11 attacks.Look around you at the company you keep. The people who support torture, six out of ten, are your neighbors, your co-workers, the people on the bus with you. If you live in Washington DC, they are your children’s friends parents, the people at Safeway, the folks you go to church with.
Now, let’s have a look at the company the United States keeps.
Tortures Human Beings
United States – YES
ISIS – YES
North Korea – YES
China – YES
Russia – YES
Nazi Germany – YES
Apartheid-Era South Africa – YES
Uses Medical Personnel to Enhance TortureUnited States – YES
ISIS – NO
North Korea – Unknown
China – Unknown
Russia – YES
Nazi Germany – YES
Apartheid-Era South Africa – YES
Maintains Third Country Detention FacilitiesUnited States – YES (including Poland)
ISIS – NO
North Korea – NO
China – NO
Russia – NO (once including Poland)
Nazi Germany – NO (once including Poland)
Apartheid-Era South Africa – NO
Kidnaps/Renders People from Other Countries to TortureUnited States – YES
ISIS – YES
North Korea – YES
China – Unknown
Russia – Unknown
Nazi Germany – YES
Apartheid-Era South Africa – NO
Sends Prisoners to Other Governments for TortureUnited States – YES (including Libya, Egypt and Syria)
ISIS – NO
North Korea – NO
China – NO
Russia – NO
Nazi Germany – NO
Apartheid-Era South Africa – NO
Holds Prisoners Indefinitely without TrialUnited States – YES
ISIS – Sort Of
North Korea – YES
China – YES
Russia – YES
Nazi Germany – YES
Apartheid-Era South Africa – NO
Kills Prisoners Under TortureUnited States – YES
ISIS – YES
North Korea – YES
China – YES
Russia – YES
Nazi Germany – YES
Apartheid-Era South Africa – YES
Holds Innocents for TortureUnited States – YES
ISIS – YES
North Korea – YES
China – YES
Russia – YES
Nazi Germany – YES
Apartheid-Era South Africa – YES
Assassinates OpponentsUnited States – YES
ISIS – YES
North Korea – YES
China – YES
Russia – YES
Nazi Germany – YES
Apartheid-Era South Africa – YES
Had Some Sort of Reconciliation Once Torture ExposedUnited States – NO
ISIS – NO
North Korea – NO
China – NO
Russia – Sort Of (Post-Stalin)
Nazi Germany (Post-War)- YES
(Post) Apartheid-Era South Africa – YES
Claims to be a Christian Nation
United States – YES
ISIS – Hells NO
North Korea – NO
China – NO
Russia – NO
Nazi Germany – NO
Apartheid-Era South Africa – YES, mostly.
BONUS: Has its State Department write sanctimonious yearly human rights reports about other countries: USA! USA! USA!
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Torture and the Destruction of the Human Being Shaker Aamer by the United States
The Bush and Obama administrations have gone to extraordinary lengths to hide America’s archipelago of secret prisons and systems of torture.For all the empty talk of “transparency” being high-fived around following the Senate Report, they at first denied any of that nasty stuff even existed, then used an ever-so-compliant media to call it all necessary for our security and very survival, then shaping dumb-cow public opinion with ersatz terms like enhanced interrogation to keep the word torture out of the discourse, then having the CIA destroy videos of the brutality, then imprisoning officials, such as John Kiriakou, who sought to expose it all, then refusing to hold hearings or conduct investigations, then employing black ops to try and derail even a cursory Senate report and finally allowing the torturers at the CIA themselves the final word on the watered-down public version of a Senate report on torture.
The Torture of Shaker Aamer by the United StatesYet, like a water leak that must find it’s way out from inside the dark place within your walls, some things become known. Now, we can read a psychiatrist’s report which includes, in detail, the torture enacted on just one prisoner of the United States, Shaker Aamer.
The once-U.S. ally Northern Alliance captured Aamer in Afghanistan and sold him to the United States as an al Qaeda member. Who knows at this point who Aamer was at that time, or what he did or did not do. If you think any of that matters, and perhaps justifies what was done to him, stop reading now. This article cannot reach you.
What was Done to One HumanIn his own words, Aamer describes the casual way his Western jailers accepted his physical presence, and skinny confessions made under Afghan torture, as all the proof necessary to imprison him in U.S. custody from 2002 until forever. The U.S. created a world of hell that only had an entrance, not caring to conceive of an exit. In no particular order (though the full report dispassionately chronicles every act by time and location), the United States of America did the following to Aamer:
— On more than one occasion an official of the United States threatened to rape Aamer’s five year old daughter, with one interrogator describing in explicit sexual detail his plans to destroy the child;
— “Welcoming Parties” and “Goodbye Parties” as Aamer was transferred among U.S. facilities. Soldiers at these “parties” were encouraged and allowed to beat and kick detainees as their proclivities and desires dictated. Here’s a video of what a beating under the eyes of American soldiers looks like.
— Aamer was made to stand for days, not allowed to sleep for days, not allowed to use the toilet and made to shit and piss on himself for days, not fed or fed minimally for days, doused with freezing water for days, over and over again. For twelve years. So far.
— Aamer was denied medical care as his interrogators controlled his access to doctors and made care for the wounds they inflicted dependent on Aamer’s ongoing compliance and repeated “confessions.”
— Aamer was often kept naked, and his faith exploited to humiliate him in culturally-specific ways. He witnessed a 17-year-old captive of America sodomized with a rifle, and was threatened with the same.
— At times the brutality took place for its own sake, disconnected from interrogations. At times it was the centerpiece of interrogation.
— The torture of Aamer continues at Gitmo, for as an occasional hunger striker he is brutally force-fed.
Torture WorksThe obsessive debate in this country over the effectiveness of torture rings eternally false: torture does indeed work. Torture is invariably about shame and vengeance, humiliation, power, and control, not gathering information. Even when left alone (especially when left alone) the torture victim is punished to imagine what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, almost always in the process assuming responsibility for creating his own terror.
And there you have the take-away point, as briefers in Washington like to say. The real point of the torture was to torture. Over twelve years, even the thinnest rationale that Aamer was a dangerous terrorist, or had valuable information to disclose, could not exist and his abusers knew it. The only goal was to destroy Shaker Aamer.
The combination of raw brutality, the careful, educated use of medical doctors to fine-tune the pain, the skills of psychiatrists and cultural advisors to enhance the impact of what was done worked exactly as it was intended. According to the psychiatrist who examined Aamer in detail at Guantanamo, there is little left of the man. He suffers from a broad range of psychiatric and physical horrors. In that sense, by the calculus his torturers employ, the torture was indeed successful.
The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan failed at great cost, al Qaeda has been reborn in Africa and greater parts of the Middle East and the U.S. has willingly transformed itself into at best a bully abroad, and a police state at home. But no mind; the full force and credit of the United States of America destroyed Shaker Aamer as revenge for all the rest, bloody proof of all the good we failed to do.
Never Again, Always AgainDespite the horrors of World War II, the mantra– never again– becomes today a sad joke. The scale is different this time, what, 600? 6000? men destroyed by torture not six million, but not the intent. The desire to inflict purposeful suffering by government order, the belief that such inhuman actions are legal, even necessary, differs little from one set of fascists to more modern ones. Given the secrecy the Nazis enjoyed for years, how full would the American camps be today? Kill them all, and let God sort them out is never far from the lips.
Torture does not leave its victims, nor does it leave a nation that condones it. The ghosts don’t disappear the way the flesh and bone can be made to go away.
The people who did this, whether the ones in the torture cell using their fists, or the ones in the White House ordering it with their pens, walk free among us. They’ll never see justice done. There will be no Nuremburg Trials for America’s evils, just a collapsing bunker in Berlin. But unlike Shaker Aamer, you are sentenced to live to see it.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
On The BBC Defending Not Torturing People
I joined fellow whistleblower and former chief Guantanamo prosecutor Colonel Morris Davis on the BBC’s World TV recently to speak out against torture.
Because most “journalism” these days defines objectivity as having people from bizarrely opposite sides of an issue yell at each other until time is up, I found myself “rebutting” a handful of nut jobs whose argument was basically that torture is good, or maybe useful, or vengeful, or whatever, as long as it hurts dirty brown Muslims because, 9/11. Witches deserved it. Also, torture works.
Torture Worked at SalemTorture does indeed work, if your goal is simply to punish, humiliate or extract false confessions. One example of torture’s very successful use in American history was with the Salem witch trials. Innocent women in 17th century America were brutalized until they admitted to being witches. In one ingenious twist of logic worthy of their post-9/11 successors, the torturers devised a 100 percent effective strategy: hold a suspected witch under water until she either drowns (oops, not a witch, exonerated) or magically floats (confirming she is a witch) and then execute her. One way or another, you’re always correct!
The logic holds for our modern day torturers. We learned than some 26 men held by the United States and tortured, some for years, truly had no connection to terrorism. Everytime they were waterboarded, threatened with death or beaten, they told the truth: they were not terrorists. However, their denials of culpability were taken merely as signs that more torture was needed to get them to confess.
9/11 Left Us with No ChoiceOne of the other points the troglodytes supporting torture, from the other guests on the BBC show to the Director of the CIA and the President, have brought up is the urgency and seriousness of the post-9/11 environment. They insist torture must be viewed in that light, not from the soft comfort of 2014. America had been attacked, and only through any and all means necessary could we protect her.
Many other times America faced dire circumstances, most far more dangerous to the nation, when government-sponsored torture on a massive scale somehow wasn’t needed to prevail. The American Civil War, and WWII, especially in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor, are two examples that come to mind. What made a handful of jihadis more dangerous?
Ticking Time Bomb ScenarioOK, OK, the ticking time bomb scenario. This one pops up as regular as bowel movements. Isn’t torture justified under a situation where a captured terrorist knows information that would stop a bus full of patriotic orphans from being blown up?
Of course, no such scenario has ever existed, and is unlikely ever to exist. For a real 24 TV-like ticking time bomb scenario to exist, here’s what would need to fall into place: the U.S. would have to capture a terrorist in a timely fashion who knew the full, precise details (Monday morning, corner of 5th and Main, Columbus, Ohio, bad guy in white Prius), the U.S. would need to know that the terrorist indeed possessed this information, the U.S. would have to know only torture would elicit the information, the terrorist would need to “break” and give up the full, true information in a timely manner and the information would need to be transmitted to the appropriate law enforcement authorities wherever they were and they would need to act conclusively under whatever time pressures existed, and be successful in their intervention.
Absent even one of those elements, there is no ticking time bomb scenario. It is a false argument for torture, as they all are.
17th Century MoralityBut at the end of the day, what troubled me most was not the odd idea that the venerable BBC had stooped to scouring the world to find advocates of torture and given them an audience larger than those they normally addressed from under the rocks they live hidden beneath, or that journalism stoops so low now.
The saddest thing of all is that in what is supposed to be the enlightened 21st century, with so many cries of “never again” echoing in our historical background, we are still forced to defend the notion that a country like the United States should not torture people. We have reverted to a 17th century morality.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Can We Sue the Government over Torture?
Can We Sue the Government over Torture? Yes. But not really.Anyone can sue the government; Van Buren v. Barack Obama. I just need to file the papers in Federal court. Oh, a couple of issues.
TortsTorture is a crime but it is arguably also a tort. Torts are civil wrongs recognized as grounds for a lawsuit. These wrongs result in an injury or harm constituting the basis for a claim by the injured party. While some torts are also crimes, the primary aim of tort law is to provide relief for the damages incurred and deter others from committing the same harms. The injured person may sue for an injunction to prevent the continuation of the tortious conduct or for monetary damages.
Sounds like the kind of stuff we all would like in regards to torture. Compensation for victims and no more torture.
StandingBut before I call up a lawyer, I first need standing or the government will can my suit in a quick motion filing to dismiss. Standing means in this case I have to show I was personally affected by the torture. I wasn’t tortured, so this will be hard. Attorneys for Anwar al Awlaki’s father previously tried to persuade a U.S. District Court to issue an injunction a few year’s ago preventing the government from the targeted killing of his son. A judge dismissed the case, ruling the father did not have standing to sue. Awlaki was killed by the government.
What About a Victim Filing Suit?OK, so maybe someone who was tortured himself could sue the U.S. government. That’d get around the question of standing.
First problem with one of the victim’s suing the USG is persuading the relevant U.S. courts that they have jurisdiction over the acts committed by Americans overseas and are prepared to apply U.S. laws extra-territorially. This gets even dicier because the torture took place sorta-kinda during a sort-kinda kind of war-thing.
This issue has been batted around the court system over Guantanamo for years, inconclusively.
Government ImmunityBut what if somehow victim actually did file a lawsuit in the U.S. against those Americans who tortured them?
Government officials acting under the “legitimate scope of their employment” are immune from suit. This is the “Westfall Act Certification” defense, via the Westfall Act of 1988. The Act permits the Attorney General, at his or her discretion, to substitute the United States as the defendant and essentially grant absolute immunity to individual government employees for actions taken within the scope of their employment.
The government would only have to say the torturers were just doing their jobs, which in a sad way they were, and that ends the suit.
There is an exception in Westfall for unconstitutional acts. The person filing the lawsuit would have to prove torture of a foreigner abroad was in fact prohibited by the Constitution. That would be one helluva hard sell.
But the Game’s Already Been DecidedAnd just to make this very clear, all the way back in 2012, Attorney General Eric Holder closed without charges the only two cases ever under investigation in connection with U.S. torture program. One case resulted in the 2002 death of an Afghan detainee at a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan, and the other the 2003 death of an Iraqi citizen in CIA custody at Abu Ghraib. Holder’s decision, said the New York Times, “eliminates the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the CIA”.
Obama also made clear the idea of suing the government, or anyone connected with torture, was a non-starter.
Long before throwing out the two cases noted above, way back in 2009 Obama said his desire was to look forward rather than conduct investigations that could alienate the intelligence community. “This is a time for reflection, not retribution,” Obama said in a statement, even as he noted torture was a “dark and painful chapter in our history.”
“It would be unfair to prosecute dedicated men and women working to protect America for conduct that was sanctioned in advance by the Justice Department,” Attorney General Holder said in a 2009 statement.
Obama officials also stated some five years ago that they would provide legal representation at no cost to CIA employees subjected to international tribunals or inquiries from Congress. They also said they would indemnify CIA staff against any financial judgments.
Short version for non-lawyers: if two presidents order it done, whatever is done is legal, and there is not a damn thing you can do about it. Thanks for playing and have a super day!
(I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice)
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Torture and the Myth of Never Again: The Persecution of John Kiriakou
No one except John Kiriakou is being held accountable for America’s torture policy. And John Kiriakou didn’t torture anyone, he just blew the whistle on it.
In a Galaxy Far, Far AwayThe United States sanctioned acts of torture by the Central Intelligence Agency and others. The acts took place in secret prisons (“black sites”) against persons detained indefinitely without trial. They were described in detail and explicitly authorized in a series of secret torture memos drafted by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury, senior lawyers in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. (Office of Legal Counsel attorneys technically answer directly to the DOJ, which is supposed to be independent from the White House, but obviously was not in this case.) Not one of those men, or their Justice Department bosses, has been held accountable for their actions.
Some tortured prisoners were killed by the CIA. Attorney General Eric Holder announced recently that no one would be held accountable for those murders either. “Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths,” he said, “the Department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Jose Rodriguez, a senior CIA official, admitted destroying videotapes of potentially admissible evidence, showing the torture of captives by operatives of the U.S. government at a secret prison thought to be located at a Vietnam-War-era airbase in Thailand. He was not held accountable for deep-sixing this evidence, nor for his role in the torture of human beings.
John Kiriakou AloneThe one man in the whole archipelago of America’s secret horrors who went to jail is former CIA officer John Kiriakou. Of the untold numbers of men and women involved in the whole nightmare show of those years, only one.
And of course, he didn’t torture anyone.
The charges against Kiriakou alleged that in answering questions from reporters about suspicions that the CIA tortured detainees in its custody, he violated the Espionage Act, once an obscure World War I-era law that aimed at punishing Americans who gave aid to the enemy. It was passed in 1917 and has been the subject of much judicial and Congressional doubt ever since. Kiriakou is one of six government whistleblowers who have been charged under the Act by the Obama administration. From 1917 until Obama came into office, only three people had ever charged in this way.
The Obama Justice Department claimed the former CIA officer “disclosed classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities.”
The charges resulted from a CIA investigation. That investigation was triggered by a filing in January 2009 on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo that contained classified information the defense had not been given through government channels, and by the discovery in the spring of 2009 of photographs of alleged CIA employees among the legal materials of some detainees at Guantanamo. According to one description, Kiriakou gave several interviews about the CIA in 2008. Court documents charge that he provided names of covert Agency officials to a journalist, who allegedly in turn passed them on to a Guantanamo legal team. The team sought to have detainees identify specific CIA officials who participated in their renditions and torture. Kiriakou was accused of providing the identities of CIA officers that may have allowed names to be linked to photographs.
The real “offense” in the eyes of the Obama administration was quite different. In 2007, Kiriakou became a whistleblower. He went on record as the first (albeit by then, former) CIA official to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, and then to condemn it as torture. He specifically mentioned the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in that secret prison in Thailand. Kiriakou also ran afoul of the CIA over efforts to clear for publication a book he had written about the Agency’s counterterrorism work.
If Kiriakou had actually tortured someone himself, even to death, there is no possibility that he would be in trouble. In the national security state that rules the roost in Washington, talking out of turn about a crime has become the only possible crime.
Facing decades away from his family and young children, Kiriakou agreed to a plea bargain and is still in prison serving a 30-month sentence.
Never AgainFor years it was the policy of the United States of America to torture and abuse its enemies or, in some cases, simply suspected enemies. It has remained a U.S. policy, even under the Obama administration, to employ “extraordinary rendition” — that is, the sending of captured terror suspects to the jails of countries that are known for torture and abuse, an outsourcing of what we no longer want to do.
Techniques that the U.S. hanged men for at Nuremburg and in post-war Japan were employed and declared lawful. To embark on such a program with the oversight of the Bush administration, learned men and women had to have long discussions, with staffers running in and out of rooms with snippets of research to buttress the justifications being so laboriously developed. The CIA undoubtedly used some cumbersome bureaucratic process to hire contractors for its torture staff. The old manuals needed to be updated, psychiatrists consulted, military survival experts interviewed, training classes set up.
Videotapes were made of the torture sessions and no doubt DVDs full of real horror were reviewed back at headquarters.
Torture techniques were even reportedly demonstrated to top officials inside the White House. Individual torturers who were considered particularly effective were no doubt identified, probably rewarded, and sent on to new secret sites to harm more people.
America just didn’t wake up one day and start slapping around some Islamic punk. These were not the torture equivalents of rogue cops. A system, a mechanism, was created. That we now can only speculate about many of the details involved and the extent of all this is a tribute to the thousands who continue to remain silent about what they did, saw, heard about, or were associated with. Many of them work now at the same organizations, remaining a part of the same contracting firms, the CIA, and the military. Our torturers.
What is it that allows all those people to remain silent? How many are simply scared, watched what happening to John Kiriakou and thought: not me, I’m not sticking my neck out to see it get chopped off. They’re almost pathetically forgivable, even if they are placing their own self-interest above that of their country.
But what about the others, the ones who remain silent about what they did or saw or aided and abetted in some fashion because they still think it was the right thing to do? The ones who will do it again when another frightened president asks them to? Or even the ones who enjoyed doing it?
The same Department of Justice that hunted down the one man who spoke against torture from the inside still maintains a special unit, 60 years after the end of WWII, dedicated to hunting down the last few at-large Nazis. They do that under the rubric of “never again.” The truth is that same team needs to be turned loose on our national security state. Otherwise, until we have a full accounting of what was done in our names by our government, the pieces are all in place for it to happen again. There, if you want to know, is the real horror.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
The Torture Never Stops
With the release of the Senate torture report, media accounts are quick to add a variant of the phrase that “Obama discontinued the enhanced interrogation programs soon after coming into office.”
That is not true.
Force-Feeding at GuantanamoImad Abdullah Hassan has spent twelve years in Guantanamo in a cage without ever being charged with anything. A judge cleared Hassan for release, finding there was not enough incriminating evidence to justify keeping him imprisoned. Hassan’s clearance came in 2009, yet he remained at America’s off-shore penal colony without explanation or hope of release. He went on a hunger strike in protest (the U.S. military refers to it as a “long-term non-religious fast”), and is being force-fed.
Hassan sued the president of the United States, claiming being force-fed at Guantanamo is torture. The lawsuit describes his treatment:
— Prisoners are strapped to a hospital bed or special restraint chair for feeding.
— Large tubes are used, and they cause undue pain when forced into the nostrils of the prisoners. Hassan was originally force-fed with a Number 8 gauge tube, later increased to a Number 14 that barely fit as it was pushed through his nostril into his stomach.
— A funnel was used to channel large amounts of liquid into the tube to feed him faster.
— So much liquid was forced through that the second time Hassan underwent this procedure, he lost consciousness and spent two days in critical condition.
— Prisoners were force-fed drugs causing them to defecate on themselves as they sat in the chair being fed. “People with hemorrhoids would leave blood on the chair and the linens would not always be changed before the next feeding,” said Hassan in the lawsuit.
— Prisoners would be be strapped down on top of others’ stool and blood for up to two hours at a time.
— Hassan was at times forcibly sedated so he could be force-fed more easily.
— If Hassan vomited on himself at any time during the procedure, the force-feeding would restart from the beginning.
— Guards took Hassan and two others to another prison block so that others would see what was being done to them, as a deterrent.
— Air-conditioning was sometimes turned up and detainees were deprived of a blanket. This was particularly difficult for the hunger strikers, as they felt the cold more than someone who was eating.
— Guards would bang hunger-striking prisoners’ cells every five minutes day and night to prevent sleep.
— The force-feeding procedures described in the lawsuit were done twice a day, every day, on prisoners.
— Even after Hassan broke down at one point and began eating again, he continued to be force-fed anyway.
— Hassan’s recorded weight fell from 119 pounds to 78 pounds. The military, in its force-feeding manual, states “Patients with weight loss can be expected in any detained population.” The manual advises “When detainees are weighed… wearing shackles or other restrictive devices, the weight of those devices will be subtracted from the measured weight.”
— Hassan has been force-fed in this manner for eight years.
Why Doesn’t He Just Eat?At this point some will be asking: why doesn’t Hassan just eat? That would stop the force-feeding torture.
It is likely Hassan himself has thought about the same question. In my former career working for the Department of State, I was responsible for the welfare of arrested Americans abroad. Many threatened hunger strikes for reasons ranging from superficial to very serious. However, in my 24 years of such work, only one prisoner carried it out for more than a day or two, taking only small sips of water for days. His captors, one of America’s allies in Asia, choose to not force-feed him, stating due to the nature of his political crime that they’d prefer to see him die.
I watched the man deteriorate before my eyes, starving to death in real-time. It requires extraordinary will and strength to do that, pushing back against all of evolution and biology screaming inside your head to just eat. Close to death, the man choose to stay alive and eat for the sake of his family. It is no casual decision to do what Hassan is doing. Something very important must be at stake for a man to do what Hassan has done.
For eight years.
And of course Hassan was still force-fed at one point when he did start eating. Imprisoned wrongly in the first place, and cleared to leave Gitmo for the last five years but still locked up, Hassan is worthy of protesting his incarceration via the only means available to him. He also understands that the force-feeding is not about keeping him alive per se, but about forcing him and others to comply with his jailers.
Dr. Mengele at GitmoThe procedures at Guantanamo (as well as at the CIA Black Sites) are performed by or supervised by U.S. military and CIA doctors who, though they had taken the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm to a patient, do anyway.
The Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) issued a lengthy study on the abandonment of millennia-old medical ethics in the post-9/11 U.S. torture programs. IMAP is a respected source of ethical comment; its board members include physicians from Columbia University, Harvard, the University of Toronto, Johns Hopkins, Boston University and a number of other prominent hospitals and medical research facilities. These are non-political, dispassionate people whose work has ended up as political under the extraordinary circumstances of our world.
IMAP produced a report entitled Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, based on two years of review of public records. The report details how military and CIA policies institutionalized a variety of acts by military and intelligence agency doctors and psychologists that breached ethical standards. These include:
— Involvement in abusive interrogation;
— Consulting on conditions of confinement to increase the disorientation and anxiety of detainees;
— Using medical information for interrogation purposes; and
— Force-feeding of hunger strikers.
In addition, IMAP says that military policies and practices impeded the ability to provide detainees with appropriate medical care and to report abuses against detainees under recognized international standards. The report explains how agencies facilitated these practices by adopting rules for military and CIA health personnel that substantially deviate from ethical standards traditionally applied. For example, violations of ethical standards were “excused” by designating health professionals not as doctors, but as “interrogation safety officers,” personnel not bound by any ethics.
Medical EthicsThe basis of medical ethics, the Hippocratic Oath which says “first, do no harm,” is understood in the real world to come into conflict with the demands on doctors in wartime. Such complicated circumstances have been dealt with, and evolved standards do exist. Here are some from a recognized international body:
Voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision… [procedures] should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury… proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
These standards were written in 1947 in Nuremberg, Germany, to guide future medical experimentation on human beings held captive. The authors were Americans sitting in judgment of 23 Nazi physicians accused of murder and torture in the concentration camps. Of course many will argue circumstances in Dachau and Guantanamo are different; this is true. The former was run by the Third Reich and the latter by the World’s Indispensable Nation.
Bad DreamsIt is like I’ve had a bad dream and awoken to remember it all.
As pundits falsely applaud the end of the U.S.’ torture regime following the election of Barack Obama, one should spare a thought for those people still in Guantanamo who endure America’s pointless wrath. The irony that the same president who said he ended torture also said he would close Guantanamo once in office is noted, but is really not much more than another spot on the white wall we imagine we are as a nation.
Why do we do it? The doctors who conduct the torture are not stupid, especially evil as we traditionally define it, or unaware of the ethics of their profession. They know as well as anyone Hassan is approved for release, and so even any piggish notions of revenge or pay back do not apply. Some of the doctors involved were likely in junior school when 9/11 happened and know about that day the same way they know about Gettysburg or the Battle of the Bulge.
We might also remind ourselves that after their military careers, some of those same young doctors will move among us in private practice, perhaps holding their dark secrets inside, perhaps enjoying them a bit too much in private moments.
I don’t know why they do it. They’ll say, perhaps to themselves in some death-bed moment of desperate remorse, that they were only following orders. One hopes their god is more understanding, because we here have heard that one before.
(Long-time readers of this blog will note I am re-running some earlier torture articles in lieu of the Senate report’s release)
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Thinking About Torture Ahead of the Senate Report
The highly-redacted Senate Intelligence Committee report on post-9/11 torture is being released as you read this. It will likely contain few details on what actually happened by America’s hand.But details or not, at the most fundamental level the report does not matter. America will sidestep the most important lessons that could have emerged: we have left the door open to torture, and torture will ultimately harm the nation more profoundly than any terrorist could.
Information already in circulation makes clear the report will reveal America’s regime was more horrific than what we already know and that torture did not generate any of the life-saving intelligence it was designed and tolerated to do.
There will be articles and talk shows pulling out every grotesque detail, played as horror porn, a real-life Saw. There will be think pieces reflecting on the terribleness of war, likely quoting some scraps of ancient text (save us from more Wikipedian Herodotus and Thucydides.) A main theme will be that while wrong and repugnant, one must view torture through the lens of those post-9/11 days when our very America was at grave risk. Torture is always unpleasant but sometimes necessary, people will say.
President Obama already staked out this position on behalf of the nation way back on August 1, saying “I understand why [torture] happened. I think it’s important when we look back to recall how afraid people were after the Twin Towers fell and the Pentagon had been hit and the plane in Pennsylvania had fallen, and people did not know whether more attacks were imminent, and there was enormous pressure on our law enforcement and our national security teams to try to deal with this. And it’s important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had. And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.”The reality is, and was, different. The torture programs continued for years after 9/11, with most officially concluding (we are lead to believe) only after Obama took office in January 2009. Despite the fear-mongering, standard intelligence tools (including, we now know, blanket NSA surveillance) painted a clearer and clearer picture that there were no more imminent attacks coming. As for the “tough job” the “folks” responsible for the torture had, it is unclear that that job was any tougher than in other times of challenge for America– during the Civil War when the nation was truly at risk, after Pearl Harbor, during tense moments of the Cold War– when fear did not congeal into torture.
No, no the idea that torture, as well as the other post-9/11 violations of acceptable human behavior such as renditions, indefinite detention without trial and the dilution of civil rights, held by American citizens for over two hundred years, can in any way be justified by their circumstances is simply wrong.
The purposeful harming of prisoners has never in human history been considered acceptable or justified, except by the torturers themselves perhaps. Does the U.S. wish to stand in history among the Inquisition, Genghis Khan and the Stasi, all of whom felt torture was justified? Torture has otherwise been broadly held evil when done by frightened soldiers in the heat of battle, and it has been held evil when sanctioned by governments. It has been outlawed by international conventions and agreements.
No U.S. president would find it acceptable if done to fellow citizens. Obama should be ashamed of himself for suggesting anything different about America’s own actions. He displays a lack of courage to confront his own national security apparatus by in any way leaving open the door that what was done was something he could “understand.” The horror was excusable once, and thus can be again. Pandora’s box has been left open.
The second expected theme of the Senate report, that torture failed to produce results, bares similar shame.Leaving aside how unlikely a true 24 “ticking time bomb” scenario really is (no torture was needed after the Boston Marathon bombing when there might actually have been a ticking bomb), it does not matter whether torture produced “results.” If somehow one could cite an example of some useful intelligence, would that justify all that was done? Would it at that point be simply a math problem — if torture saved two lives it was still bad, but if it saved 54, or a 106, or 3,013, then it was justified and thus needed to be kept in America’s global toolbox for the “next time?”
What matters more is that the long-term result of choosing expediency over morality has always resulted in great harm to a nation. Now, look to Thucydides, the ancient historian — the abandonment by Athens those centuries ago of its core principles in the destruction of innocents lead to the destruction of Athenian democracy. The lessons of history matter, especially for the first democracy founded since Athens.
America, as national policy, tortured human beings. It did so out of fear, out of revenge, because it wanted to lash out and it could. Unless the president will step back from complicity on behalf of our nation and admit torture was simply wrong, and risked greater long-term harm to America than a terrorist could inflict, well ahead of the Senate report’s release we already know it doesn’t matter.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
CIA, Senate and a Constitutional Crisis Resolved (not in favor of the Constitution)
Chroniclers of the decline of the republic will recall March 2014. Speaking then in reference to revelations that the CIA searched computers being used by Senate staffers, and removed documents those staffers received from the CIA detailing its post-9/11 torture program, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein said:I have grave concerns that the CIA’s search may well have violated the separation of powers principles embodied in the United States Constitution, including the Speech and Debate Clause. It may have undermined the constitutional framework essential to effective congressional oversight of intelligence activities.
[CIA actions] may also have violated the Fourth Amendment, the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, as well as Executive Order 12333, which prohibits the CIA from conducting domestic searches or surveillance.
Feinstein went on to say then “The interrogations and the conditions of confinement at the CIA detentions sites were far different and far more harsh than the way the CIA had described them to us” and emphasized that her committee’s report would detail “the horrible details of the CIA program that never, never, never should have existed.”
It appears more than likely the files the CIA pulled out of the Senate’s hands would reveal two presidents lied to the world about the torture program, and that horrors beyond what we know were committed in our names.
A classified 6,300-page Senate report on torture was prepared 19 months ago, before the details of the CIA spying became public. Calls were made, in March 2014, to declassify parts and release them to the public. Now, in July, we are still waiting.
The Constitutional Crisis
The bulk of the Constitution is a road map to the checks and balances the Founders created to ensure no one part of government would become so strong and powerful so as to negate the others. Chief among those checks and balances is the oversight role Congress plays over the Executive branch. Simply put, Congress investigates what the Executive does. That is what Dianne Feinstein and her Senate Intelligence Committee were doing looking into the truth behind the lies of CIA torture.
When the Executive, using the CIA in this instance (and there are credible claims Obama personally knew of the CIA’s activities ahead of time), inserts itself wrongly in that process by spying on and manipulating evidence of the Committee, you have a Constitutional crisis. The essential checks and balances designed to sustain our democracy and rein in an out-of-control Executive are no longer functioning.
The Obama administration declined to get involved. Then-White House spokesperson Jay Carney announced Obama administration lawyers were told about the CIA’s intentions to have the Department of Justice investigate Senate staffers for potentially stealing classified documents they sought to hold on to after the CIA tried to delete them by spying on and penetrating the records database, but did not approve or weigh in on the agency’s decision.
With the White House choosing the sidelines, a DOJ investigation, no matter the motive, was the only check and balance to be applied to this crisis of power, and the only hope for public clarity about what really happened.
The DOJ Declines Intervening on the Side of the Constitution
On July 10, 2014, DOJ released a short statement: “The department carefully reviewed the matters referred to us and did not find sufficient evidence to warrant a criminal investigation.” There will be no reckoning of what the CIA did to conceal or influence the Senate report.
Previously, in 2012, the Justice Department closed an inquiry into prosecuting low-level CIA practitioners of torture without bringing any charges.
Post-Constitutional America, Again
Dianne Feinstein appears to have made no comment on the DOJ decision despite her central role in all this and previous claims of unconstitutional actions by the Executive. As this is written, her most recent public remarks deal with immigration. The last reference found on her official website to the torture report is from April 2014.
The CIA attacks on the Senate, designed to impede, alter or influence the outcome of a report on torture, coupled with a lack of concern from the White House and the Department of Justice, as well as apparently by the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee itself, are another example of our new world, a Post-Constitutional America where the old rules of an aging republic no longer apply.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Classification: Hiding American War from Americans
Our government classifies a lot of documents, some 92 million in 2011 alone.
The ostensible point of all that classification is protect the nation’s secrets. Some of it even makes sense. Troop movements, nuclear things, identities of spies, traditional stuff you want to keep from your enemies. The purpose of classification is not to hide government mistakes or prevent embarrassing things from coming into daylight.
The president even said so. Obama’s 2009 Executive Order on National Security Information made clear “In no case shall information be classified, continue to be maintained as classified, or fail to be declassified in order to conceal violations of law, inefficiency, or administrative error, or “prevent embarrassment to a person, organization, or agency.”
More Irony in a Nation Awash with It
Yes, more irony in a nation awash with it. But seriously, when the point of classification is keeping the realities of America’s wars from Americans, that says we are the enemy. Today’s case in point:
The top official in charge of the classification system decided that it was legitimate for the Marines to classify photographs that showed American forces posing with corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan, and urinating on them. Many of the photos have already been published, but no matter, whatever hasn’t leaked out is now a secret. A kicker is that the “top official” who decides these things is some guy at the National Archives you’ve never heard of.
That top official is allowed to be the final arbiter of what Americans can see of their wars because of Executive Order 13526, Section 5.5, which grants him alone the authority to make a report to the head of an agency, or to the designated senior agency official for classified national security information, if any members of the agency knowingly, willfully, or negligently classify or continue the classification of information in violation of the Order. So, in this case, he just did that, confirming in a simple letter that the Marines can keep the photos a secret.
Support the Troops!
The stated reason for the secrecy? To support the troops, of course. The rationale is that the release of additional images would make the Taliban somehow even angrier at the U.S. for occupying Afghanistan for 13 years and provoke more attacks. The same rationale, though a different legal manipulation, was used to keep additional photos of American torture at Abu Ghraib and images from the bin Laden kill locked up.
A video of the Marines’ now-classified act is still on YouTube:
Unless the Taliban can’t see YouTube from Afghanistan, they already know what happened.
Another thing the Taliban also know is that the Marine Corps sniper captured on a YouTube video urinating on the corpses of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan was only reduced in rank after a court-martial. So, an act by a Marine that supposedly could cost American lives is punished merely by a reduction in rank. And even that mild rebuke took two years to happen. That couldn’t possibly stir anyone up in Afghanistan.
We Got This
The Taliban, as the Iraqis before them, know darn well what happened. It is even possible they know of atrocities by American troops that weren’t photographed as trophies of war and are thus unknown to Americans. Classifying the photos does not change the fact that the atrocities happened. It only tries (albeit crudely and stupidly) to hide those atrocities from the American people.
BONUS: For anyone offended by the images above, or who thinks I should label this article NSFW because of the pee pee thing, please stop for a moment and acknowledge what you see here was done by Americans to people they just killed. In that sense only is it offensive and obscene.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Jack Rice Interview: Torture Laid Bare, Nuremberg and Guantanamo
A powerful interview with radio host Jack Rice of KTNF, 950AM. We discuss my article Torture Laid Bare at Nuremberg, and Maybe Guantanamo. What does it say to the world when we return to the days of torture, especially with the help of doctors?
The full interview is online here.
The interview itself starts about 4:45 in, after a detailed introduction.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Torture Laid Bare at Nuremberg, and Maybe Guantanamo?
In another time and place, the intentional mistreatment and torture of human beings, often with the assistance of medical doctors and learned men and women, was made public to destroy it. But open justice at Nuremberg and hidden justice at Guantanamo are so very, very different.
Or maybe not. New details in the trial of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri may give the world the clearest view yet of America’s torture program.
Nuremberg
Following World War II the United States and its Allies could have easily executed Nazis responsible for the Holocaust at a black site, or simply have thrown them into some forever jail on an isolated, island military base. It would have been hard to find anyone who would not have supported brutally torturing them. Instead, those evil men and women were put on public trial at Nuremberg, supplied with lawyers and made to defend their actions as the evidence against them was laid bare. The point was in part to demonstrate justice, that We were better than Them. The hope was also to ensure it all would never happen again.
Though the scale remains very different, the intentions and actions echo across the decades. The United States, as a policy of our nation, used its full range of global resources to kidnap, imprison and torture human beings for its political aims. Now, in an obscene reimaging of justice, that same United States government works to the extent of its ability to hide what it did.
What it did was torture. Here’s how the United States is trying to hide it.
The Sham of Justice
Trials of a sort are ongoing at Guantanamo. The case of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a Saudi accused of orchestrating the 2000 bombing of the destroyer USS Cole, is underway.
Nashiri was held in CIA “black sites” and was one of three prisoners that the United States admits waterboarding. The CIA’s inspector general called Nashiri the “most significant” case of a detainee who was brutalized in ways that went beyond even the tortures approved by the Bush administration, including being threatened with a power drill. A specialist in treating torture victims (prosecuters aggressively tried to disqualify the witness as an expert) testified that Nashiri had been subjected to “physical, psychological and sexual torture.” As part of his torture, Nashiri was analy raped.
Nashiri no doubt remembers every detail: his own screams, the looks on his torturers faces as they broke him, what they said to him about freedom and America as he was beaten, raped and waterboarded. But at Guantanamo, Nashiri’s lawyers cannot introduce those tortures as part of his defense, because the U.S. government classified them. Nashiri cannot discuss the details of his own torture at his own trial, nor can his lawyers access CIA files of his torture. They are classified.
Even the court at Guantanamo found this too far from any concept of justice, and ordered the government to release the documentation, albeit still with the classifications, to Nashiri’s lawyer.
(BACKGROUND: At one point government prosecutors argued against the release order as too broad, stating at one point that the defense must specify exact documents by name, impossible as even such details are classified– a Catch 22. Also in Nashiri’s case, the government admitted it had “inadvertently” accessed confidential e-mails among Nashiri’s defense lawyers made via Guantanamo’s computer systems. No mistrial was declared.)
Torture Records Sought, Fought
Despite the court’s order that the torture records be released to the defense team (the team also seeks testimony from the CIA torturers themselves, who, if they are indeed compelled to speak of their actions in front of their victim, will be allowed to testify under false names), the government is now arguing in a new motion that they should not be required to release any records.
The government’s argument would be funny in less dire circumstances. In an motion, prosecuters state the chief reason not to release the torture documents is that information from Gitmo should not get ahead of information that may be made public out of the White House at some vague future date.
(BACKGROUND: The Senate Intelligence Committee voted April 3 to ask the Obama administration to declassify a lengthy executive summary of its investigative report on the torture and rendition program. The administration punted the issue to CIA claiming they had to review the document and make redactions first. There is no target date for release even now, more than a month since that process should have started.)
The real reason for trying to block release of the documentation of Nashiri’s torture however seems darker than just wanting to avoid upstaging the White House: Prosecutors at Gitmo likely remain fearful that the unredacted documents pertaining to Nashiri’s torture may reveal far more heinous actions by the government than whatever sanitized version emerges from the CIA-edited version. Here’s why.
Why the Government is Trying to Block Release of the Documents
The goal of the defense in seeking the torture records is to show that Nashiri’s treatment was so outside any standards of accepted human behavior that any statements or confessions he made should not be admissible in the trial designed to determine if he should now be executed. The defense also seeks to show that the traumas purposely inflicted on Nashiri, and the lack of medical care afforded him afterwards, rendered him so psychologically damaged that he is not competent to stand trial in defense of his own life.
At the same time, these same documents could provide the clearest picture to date of the U.S. government’s torture program. That’s what the prosecutors in Guantanamo are very likely really trying to suppress. Specifically, why is the government so scared? Have a look at what the current judge’s order requires them to produce:
— A chronology identifying where Nashiri was held in detention between the date of his capture to the date he arrived at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba in September 2006; [NOTE: Nashiri was captured in Dubai and believed to have been held in Afghanistan, Thailand, Poland, Morocco, and Romania.]
— A description of how Nashiri was transported between the various locations including how he was restrained and how he was clothed;
— All records, photographs, videos and summaries the Government of the United States has in its possession which document the condition of Nashiri’s confinement at each location, and Nashiri’s conditions during each movement between the various locations; [NOTE: The CIA destroyed video of Nashiri’s waterboarding in 2005.]
— The identities of medical personnel (examining and treating physicians, psychologist, psychiatrists, mental health professionals, dentists, etc.), guard force personnel, and interrogators, whether employees of the United States Government or employees of a contractor hired by the United States Government, who had direct and substantial contact with Nashiri; [Note that former CIA case officer John Kiriakou is currently serving a sentence in federal prison for revealing the identity of a CIA staffer involved in the torture program.]
— Copies of the standard operating procedures, policies, or guidelines on handling, moving, transporting, treating, interrogating, etc., high value detainees at and between the various facilities;
— The employment records of individuals identified memorializing adverse action and/or positive recognition in connection with performance of duties at a facility or in transporting Nashiri between the various facilities;
— The records of training in preparation for the performance of duties of the individuals at the various facilities or during transport of Nashiri;
— All statements obtained from interrogators, summaries of interrogations, reports produced from interrogations, interrogations logs, and interrogator notes of interrogations of Nashiri and all co-conspirators identified on the Charge Sheet dated 15 September 2011; [Note the date. Despite the USS Cole bombing having occurred 11 years earlier, Nashiri was not charged with any crime until four days after 9/11.]
— Un-redacted copies of requests with any accompanying justifications and legal reviews of same to employ Enhanced Interrogation Techniques on Nashiri and all co-conspirators;
— Un-redacted copies of documents memorializing decisions (approving or disapproving), with any additional guidance, on requests to employ Enhanced Interrogation Techniques on Nashiri and all co-conspirators.
What if Nashiri Wins?
Ahead, many things are unclear. Prosecutors may win their motion now in front of the Gitmo judge, meaning some or all of the documents will not be released. They may succeed in editing or redacting what is released. They may block Nashiri’s lawyers from discussing in any public forum what is contained in the documents, meaning even their release will never see the information leave Guantanamo.
But what if Nashiri wins?
If, against very long odds, Nashiri wins, and if some or all of the documents are made public, the world will learn in much of the same banal evil of detail as from Nuremburg what the United States has done in the name of its own twisted definition of freedom.
The world will learn– maybe by name– who did these things and thus have the ability to someday hold them responsible for their acts, should we acquire the courage to do so. It will learn in part who authorized and approved torture, and what efforts were made to train and equip the men and women who carried out that torture.
Of most value to us all is that these detailed records from the case of Nashiri will pressure Obama to release the more comprehensive record of torture he and his CIA now hold in their hands. The sanitized version of events the White House would likely prefer to release would not stand up to the details that might be heard in Guantanamo.
Obama and the CIA have to feel now that the troops are closing in on their bunker in Berlin. What will they do, now, with their enemy at the gates?
We learned significant details of the torture program already out of Guantanamo, through the testimony of a psychiatrist in the trial of Shaker Aamer.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Torture and the Destruction of the Human Being Shaker Aamer by the United States
Somedays we have a little fun in this space, commenting on world events with a joke, some satire, a little snark. Today will not be one of those days.
The Bush and Obama administrations have gone to extraordinary lengths to hide America’s archipelago of secret prisons and systems of torture. They at first denied any of that even existed, then used an ever-so-compliant media to call it all necessary for our security and very survival, then shaping dumb-cow public opinion with ersatz terms like enhanced interrogation to keep the word torture out of the discourse, then having the CIA destroy videos of the brutality, then imprisoning officials, such as John Kiriakou, who sought to expose it all, then refusing to hold hearings or conduct investigations, then employing black ops to try and derail even a cursory Senate report and, of this date, allowing the torturers at the CIA themselves the final word on what if anything will appear in the public version of a Senate report on torture that may or may not see the light of day anytime soon.
The Torture of Shaker Aamer by the United States
Yet, like a water leak that must find it’s way out from inside the dark place within your walls, some things become known. Now, we can read a psychiatrist’s report which includes, in detail, the torture enacted on just one prisoner of the United States, Shaker Aamer.
The once-U.S. ally Northern Alliance captured Aamer in Afghanistan and sold him to the United States as an al Qaeda member. Who knows at this point who Aamer was at that time, or what he did or did not do. If you think any of that that matters, and perhaps justifies what was done to him, stop reading now. This article cannot reach you.
What was Done to One Human
In his own words, Aamer describes the casual way his Western jailers accepted his physical presence, and skinny confessions made under Afghan torture, as all the proof necessary to imprison him in U.S. custody from 2002 until forever. The U.S. created a world of hell that only had an entrance, not caring to conceive of an exit. In no particular order (though the full report dispassionately chronicles every act by time and location), the United States of America did the following to Aamer:
— On more than one occasion an official of the United States threatened to rape Aamer’s five year old daughter, with one interrogator describing in explicit sexual detail his plans to destroy the child;
— “Welcoming Parties” and “Goodbye Parties” as Aamer was transferred among U.S. facilities. Soldiers at these “parties” were encouraged and allowed to beat and kick detainees as their proclivities and desires dictated. Here’s a video of what a beating under the eyes of American soldiers looks like.
— Aamer was made to stand for days, not allowed to sleep for days, not allowed to use the toilet and made to shit and piss on himself for days, not fed or fed minimally for days, doused with freezing water for days, over and over again. For twelve years. So far.
— Aamer was denied medical care as his interrogators controlled his access to doctors and made care for the wounds they inflicted dependent on Aamer’s ongoing compliance and repeated “confessions.”
— Aamer was often kept naked, and his faith exploited to humiliate him in culturally-specific ways. He witnessed a 17 year old captive of America sodomized with a rifle, and was threatened with the same.
— At times the brutality took place for its own sake, disconnected from interrogations. At times it was the centerpiece of interrogation.
— The torture of Aamer continues at Gitmo, for as an occasional hunger striker he is brutally force-fed.
Torture Works
The obsessive debate in this country over the effectiveness of torture rings eternally false: torture does indeed work. Torture is invariably about shame and vengeance, humiliation, power, and control, not gathering information. Even when left alone (especially when left alone) the torture victim is punished to imagine what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, almost always in the process assuming responsibility for creating his own terror. And there you have the take-away point, as briefers in Washington like to say. The real point of the torture was to torture. Over twelve years, even the thinnest rationale that Aamer was a dangerous terrorist, or had valuable information to disclose, could not exist and his abusers knew it. The only goal was to destroy Shaker Aamer.
The combination of raw brutality, the careful, educated use of medical doctors to fine-tune the pain, the skills of psychiatrists and cultural advisors to enhance the impact of what was done worked exactly as it was intended. According to the psychiatrist who examined Aamer in detail at Guantanamo, there is little left of the man. He suffers from a broad range of psychiatric and physical horrors. In that sense, by the calculus his torturers employ, the torture was indeed successful. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan failed at great cost, al Qaeda has been reborn in Africa and greater parts of the Middle East and the U.S. has willingly transformed itself into at best a bully abroad, and a police state at home. But no mind; the full force and credit of the United States of America destroyed Shaker Aamer as revenge for all the rest, bloody proof of all the good we failed to do.
Never Again, Always Again
Despite the horrors of World War II, the mantra– never again– becomes today a sad joke. The scale is different this time, what, 600? 6000? men destroyed by torture not six million, but not the intent. The desire to inflict purposefully suffering by government order, the belief that such inhuman actions are legal, even necessary, differs little from one set of fascists to more modern ones. Given the secrecy the Nazis enjoyed for years, how full would the American camps be today? Kill them all, and let God sort them out is never far from the lips.
Torture does not leave its victims, nor does it leave a nation that condones it. The ghosts don’t disappear the way the flesh and bone can be made to go away.
The people who did this, whether the ones in the torture cell using their fists, or the ones in the White House ordering it with their pens, walk free among us. They’ll never see justice done. There will be no Nuremburg Trials for America’s evils, just a collapsing bunker in Berlin. But unlike Shaker Aamer, you are sentenced to live to see it.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
When Does the Torture End?
While the unfolding Constitutional crisis over the CIA’s spying on Senate staffers reviewing the torture program continues, all media accounts are quick to add to their articles a variant of the phrase that “Obama discontinued the enhanced interrogation programs soon after coming into office.”That is not true.
Force-Feeding at Guantanamo
Imad Abdullah Hassan has spent twelve years in Guantanamo in a cage without ever being charged with anything. A judge cleared Hassan for release, finding there was not enough incriminating evidence to justify keeping him imprisoned. Hassan’s clearance came in 2009, yet he remains at America’s off-shore penal colony without explanation or hope of release. He went on a hunger strike in protest (the U.S. military refers to it as a “long-term non-religious fast”), and is being force-fed.
Hassan is now suing the president of the United States, claiming the conditions under which he is being force-fed at Guantanamo are torture. The lawsuit Hassan filed describes his treatment:
— Prisoners are strapped to a hospital bed or special restraint chair for feeding.
— Large tubes are used, and they cause undue pain when forced into the nostrils of the prisoners. Hassan was originally force-fed with a Number 8 gauge tube, later increased to a Number 14 that barely fit as it was pushed through his nostril into his stomach.
— A funnel was used to channel large amounts of liquid into the tube to feed him faster.
— So much liquid was forced through that the second time Hassan underwent this procedure, he lost consciousness and spent two days in critical condition.
— Prisoners were force-fed drugs causing them to defecate on themselves as they sat in the chair being fed. “People with hemorrhoids would leave blood on the chair and the linens would not always be changed before the next feeding,” said Hassan in the lawsuit.
— Prisoners would be be strapped down on top of others’ stool and blood for up to two hours at a time.
— Hassan was at times forcibly sedated so he could be force-fed more easily.
— If Hassan vomited on himself at any time during the procedure, the force-feeding would restart from the beginning.
— Guards took Hassan and two others to another prison block so that others would see what was being done to them, as a deterrent.
— Air-conditioning was sometimes turned up and detainees were deprived of a blanket. This was particularly difficult for the hunger strikers, as they felt the cold more than someone who was eating.
— Guards would bang hunger-striking prisoners’ cells every five minutes day and night to prevent sleep.
— The force-feeding procedures described in the lawsuit were done twice a day, every day, on prisoners.
— Even after Hassan broke down at one point and began eating again, he continued to be force-fed anyway.
— Hassan’s recorded weight fell from 119 pounds to 78 pounds. The military, in its force-feeding manual, states “Patients with weight loss can be expected in any detained population.” The manual advises “When detainees are weighed… wearing shackles or other restrictive devices, the weight of those devices will be subtracted from the measured weight.”
— Hassan has been force-fed in this manner for eight years.
Why Doesn’t He Just Eat?
At this point some will be asking: why doesn’t Hassan just eat? That would stop the force-feeding torture.
It is likely Hassan himself has thought about the same question. In my former career working for the Department of State, I was responsible for the welfare of arrested Americans abroad. Many threatened hunger strikes for reasons ranging from superficial to very serious. However, in my 24 years of such work, only one prisoner carried it out for more than a day or two, taking only small sips of water for days. His captors, one of America’s allies in Asia, choose to not force-feed him, stating due to the nature of his political crime that they’d prefer to see him die.
I watched the man deteriorate before my eyes, starving to death in real-time. It requires extraordinary will and strength to do that, pushing back against all of evolution and biology screaming inside your head to just eat. Close to death, the man choose to stay alive and eat for the sake of his family. It is no casual decision to do what Hassan is doing. Something very important must be at stake for a man to do what Hassan has done.
For eight years.
And of course Hassan was still force-fed at one point when he did start eating. Imprisoned wrongly in the first place, and cleared to leave Gitmo for the last five years but still locked up, Hassan is worthy of protesting his incarceration via the only means available to him. He also understands that the force-feeding is not about keeping him alive per se, but about forcing him and others to comply with his jailers.
Dr. Mengele at Gitmo
The procedures at Guantanamo (as well as at the CIA Black Sites) are performed by or supervised by U.S. military and CIA doctors who, though they had taken the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm to a patient, do anyway.
The Institute on Medicine as a Profession (IMAP) issued a lengthy study on the abandonment of millennia-old medical ethics in the post-9/11 U.S. torture programs. IMAP is a respected source of ethical comment; its board members include physicians from Columbia University, Harvard, the University of Toronto, Johns Hopkins, Boston University and a number of other prominent hospitals and medical research facilities. These are non-political, dispassionate people whose work has ended up as political under the extraordinary circumstances of our world.
IMAP produced a report entitled Ethics Abandoned: Medical Professionalism and Detainee Abuse in the War on Terror, based on two years of review of public records. The report details how military and CIA policies institutionalized a variety of acts by military and intelligence agency doctors and psychologists that breached ethical standards. These include:
— Involvement in abusive interrogation;
— Consulting on conditions of confinement to increase the disorientation and anxiety of detainees;
— Using medical information for interrogation purposes; and
— Force-feeding of hunger strikers.
In addition, IMAP says that military policies and practices impeded the ability to provide detainees with appropriate medical care and to report abuses against detainees under recognized international standards. The report explains how agencies facilitated these practices by adopting rules for military and CIA health personnel that substantially deviate from ethical standards traditionally applied. For example, violations of ethical standards were “excused” by designating health professionals not as doctors, but as “interrogation safety officers,” personnel not bound by any ethics.
Medical Ethics
The basis of medical ethics, the Hippocratic Oath which says “first, do no harm,” is understood in the real world to come into conflict with the demands on doctors in wartime. Such complicated circumstances have been dealt with, and evolved standards do exist. Here are some from a recognized international body:
Voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have legal capacity to give consent; should be so situated as to be able to exercise free power of choice, without the intervention of any element of force, fraud, deceit, duress, over-reaching, or other ulterior form of constraint or coercion; and should have sufficient knowledge and comprehension of the elements of the subject matter involved as to enable him to make an understanding and enlightened decision… [procedures] should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury… proper preparations should be made and adequate facilities provided to protect the experimental subject against even remote possibilities of injury, disability, or death.
These standards were written in 1947 in Nuremberg, Germany, to guide future medical experimentation on human beings held captive. The authors were Americans sitting in judgment of 23 Nazi physicians accused of murder and torture in the concentration camps. Of course many will argue circumstances in Dachau and Guantanamo are different; this is true. The former was run by the Third Reich and the latter by the World’s Indispensable Nation.
Bad Dreams
It is like I’ve had a bad dream and awoken to remember it all.
As pundits falsely applaud the end of the U.S.’ torture regime following the election of Barack Obama, one should spare a thought for those 154 people still in Guantanamo who still endure America’s pointless wrath. The irony that the same president who said he ended torture also said he would close Guantanamo once in office is noted, but is really not much more than another spot on the white wall we imagine we are as a nation.
Why do we do it? The doctors who conduct the torture are not stupid, especially evil as we traditionally define it, or unaware of the ethics of their profession. They know as well as anyone Hassan is approved for release, and so even any piggish notions of revenge or pay back do not apply. Some of the doctors involved were likely in junior school when 9/11 happened and know about that day the same way they know about Gettysburg or the Battle of the Bulge.
We might also remind ourselves that after their military careers, some of those same young doctors will move among us in private practice, perhaps holding their dark secrets inside, perhaps enjoying them a bit too much in private moments.
I don’t know why they do it. They’ll say, perhaps to themselves in some death-bed moment of desperate remorse, that they were only following orders. One hopes their god is more understanding, because we here have heard that one before.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Video of Torture in Afghanistan as American Soldiers Stand By and Watch
This is horrific, what appears to be a video of Afghan military beating and torturing a bound captive while persons who appear to be American soldiers stand by and watch. One of the Americans has on surgical gloves and is holding something that indicates he is there as a combat medic. When Americans conduct torture, medical personnel are typically available to ensure the torture is done to inflict maximum pain without typically killing the victim.
Rolling Stone, which obtained the video, dates the incident as post-2012.
Like the scenes of torture from Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, this video is widely circulating on Afghan websites, ensuring the continued decline in American credibility.
A final warning. We’ve all seen horrible stuff on the web, but this is a new step beyond. The audio is chilling. It inhuman. If those people are Americans, they have no right to call themselves soldiers, nor men.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Too Hilarious: Susan Rice Decries Torture (except by the U.S.)
Where, oh where to begin?
America’s would-be Secretary of State, Obama confidante and rumored former lover, and our next National Security Advisor, has the temerity to actually ask anyone to commit to ending torture? This is hilarious. Rice, and the people she works with, have fully abandoned reality and now just say whatever the hell suits the moment, confidant no one will even bother to remember what they said yesterday, especially America’s somnolent “journalists.”
Ho, ho, now the U.S. wants to criticize (other) people who commit torture, sure, why not put that out there? It’s what, the International Day for Victims of Torture? Maybe to celebrate the U.S. will force two cans of Ensure down the throats of those held indefinitely in Guantanamo. I hope to hell someone told the men waterboarded and otherwise brutalized by the United States that today’s their special day! Hey, the U.S. even let Bradley Manning wear clothes and eat dog food as a special treat!
Susan should read this formerly Top Secret CIA document explaining torture techniques, and noting the many “exceptions” field officers took– threatening with a power drill, claiming they would rape the prisoner’s female relatives in front of him, stating they would find and kill a prisoner’s children and so forth. One prisoner was waterboarded 82 times. Sleep deprivation was “limited” to only 11 days.
Susan might also wish to review the photos from Abu Ghraib to see what Americans did.
I strongly encourage everyone to get on The Twitter, find @AmbassadorRice, and send her a REPLY with your thoughts. Your comments, if read by anyone other than the NSA, will be read by one of Rice’s staffers, not the Evil Queen herself of course. While Rice’s pact with Satan is already written in blood, your remarks may free one of her staffers from bondage. Save a life, send a Tweet.
Susan Rice, you disgust decent people.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
Destroying Rights Guaranteed since the Magna Carta
Here are the Department of Justice’s legal arguments granting permission to the president to assassinate Americans if they are connected with al Qaeda, essentially destroying rights guaranteed citizens since the Magna Carta— right to life, right to a trial, right to due process.This will be one of the documents historians study years from now while chronicling the end of the American experiment in democracy. Those historians will conclude that no foreign power defeated us; we ate ourselves.
Torture as American Policy
The release of these legal arguments comes on the same day that the Open Society Foundation detailed the CIA’s effort to outsource torture since 9/11 in excruciating detail. Known as “extraordinary rendition,” the practice concerns taking detainees to and from U.S. custody without a legal process — think of it like an off-the-books extradition — and often entailed handing detainees over to countries that practiced torture. The Open Society Foundation found that 136 people went through the post-9/11 extraordinary rendition, and 54 countries were complicit in it. The U.S. worked with Iran to take new prisoners, and sent others into Assad’s Syria for torture.
Justification to Ignore the Constitution
According to MSNBC, the undated DOJ memo is entitled “Lawfulness of a Lethal Operation Directed Against a U.S. Citizen who is a Senior Operational Leader of Al Qa’ida or An Associated Force.” It was provided to members of the Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees in June by administration officials on the condition that it be kept confidential and not discussed publicly. The white paper was represented by administration officials as a policy document that closely mirrors the arguments of classified memos on targeted killings by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The administration has refused to turn over to Congress or release those more detailed memos publicly, or even to overtly confirm they existence.
In the DOJ white paper, it is determined that in order for the United States of America to kill one of its own citizens, all that is needed is that “an informed, high-level official of the U.S. Government has determined that the targeted individual poses an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States,” and that capture is not feasible and of course that the laws of war are followed. For those tracking the amount of blood on the president’s hands, note that no review takes place, no due process, no jury, no anything, just death because the president (or, technically, any anonymous informed high-level official) says kill that man, woman or child. This is considered by the Department of Justice to be “a lawful act of national self-defense.”
DOJ specifically states that if the targeted individual had rights under the Fourth Amendment and the Due Process Clause, such rights would not “immunize him from a lethal operation.”
The Fourth Amendment is a now-quaint part of the U.S. Constitution that guards against unreasonable searches and seizures, along with requiring any warrant to be judicially sanctioned and supported by probable cause. The Due Process Clause is contained in the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. It once acted as a safeguard from arbitrary denial of life, liberty, or property by the Government. The clear intent of Due Process, appearing twice in the Constitution, is to assure Americans that the government cannot act against them outside of a judicial process, a set of laws to protect against the government having too much power.
The Department of Justice also concludes that the murder of an American Citizen under such circumstances “would not violate certain criminal provisions prohibiting the killing of U.S. nationals outside the United States; nor would it constitute the commission of a war crime or an assassination prohibited by Executive Order.”
It was found that “the realities of the conflict and the weight of the government’s interest in protecting its citizens from an imminent attack are such that the Constitution would not require the government to provide further process to such a U.S. Citizen before using lethal force.”
The document notes that “the condition that the operational leader present an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future.” Instead, DOJ asserts a “broader definition of imminence.”
Neatly, to conclude their argument, the Department of Justice states that due to the unique circumstances of the conflict with terror, “there exists no appropriate judicial forum to evaluate these constitutional considerations.”
The End of the Experiment
One is left literally gasping for air, pale with anger, wondering what we have become in America. Have we stooped to the level of the Nazi Nuremberg Laws, which in precise legalese justified the Holocaust? Have we reached the point where we believe we must destroy our beautiful Constitution in order to save it?
Of what value anymore is the oath all Federal employees take, the same oath Obama took on the steps of the Capitol last month, promising to defend and uphold the Constitution? What value is that oath when with a memo he deems that that Constitution does not apply when there is killing to be done abroad. What type of nation declares war on its own citizens?
Those questions are left rhetorical for now, but this much is now true: the president of the United States has granted himself legal justification to ignore the most basic tenet of freedom– the right to live– and empowered himself to kill his own citizens without any form of due process or judicial procedure. It is an easy way for a writer to grab headlines, claiming such-and-such is the end of our rights, such as the limits imposed on habeas corpus, online spying, no-fly lists, restrictions on free speech, etc. But now we have truly approached the edge, because when you are dead, killed extra judicially by your own government, well, no other theoretical rights really matter anymore.
Abu Graid, Guantanamo, the CIA secret prisons, imprisonment without trial of Bradley Manning, those are not aberrations or exceptions– they were practice. These are indeed the darkest of days for our democratic experiment.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
John Kiriakou, Scooter Libby and the Myth of Justice
John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, pleaded guilty to leaking the identity of one of the agency’s covert operatives to a reporter and was sentenced on January 24, 2013 to two and a half years in prison. As part of a plea deal, prosecutors dropped charges that had been filed under the World War I-era Espionage Act.
District Judge Leonie Brinkema noted the two and a half-year term was identical to that imposed on Scooter Libby, the chief of staff to former Vice President Dick Cheney. Libby was convicted of leaking the covert identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame in a politically-motivated attack on her husband in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Libby’s sentence was commuted by President George W. Bush to zero, while Kiriakou will be required to serve his full time.
In an America where the same crime is treated ever so differently– leak a name to help George W. Bush and get a reprieve, leak a name to expose torture and go to jail– Kiriakou’s story is worth repeating today.
In a Galaxy Far, Far Away
Here is what military briefers like to call BLUF, the Bottom Line Up Front: no one except John Kiriakou is being held accountable for America’s torture policy. And John Kiriakou didn’t torture anyone, he just blew the whistle on it.
A long time ago, with mediocre grades and no athletic ability, I applied for a Rhodes Scholarship. I guess the Rhodes committee at my school needed practice, and I found myself undergoing a rigorous oral examination. Here was the final question they fired at me, probing my ability to think morally and justly: You are a soldier. Your prisoner has information that might save your life. The only way to obtain it is through torture. What do you do?
At that time, a million years ago in an America that no longer exists, my obvious answer was never to torture, never to lower oneself, never to sacrifice one’s humanity and soul, even if it meant death. My visceral reaction: to become a torturer was its own form of living death. (An undergrad today, after the “enhanced interrogation” Bush years and in the wake of 24, would probably detail specific techniques that should be employed.) My advisor later told me my answer was one of the few bright spots in an otherwise spectacularly unsuccessful interview.
It is now common knowledge that between 2001 and about 2007 the United States Department of Justice (DOJ) sanctioned acts of torture committed by members of the Central Intelligence Agency and others. The acts took place in secret prisons (“black sites”) against persons detained indefinitely without trial. They were described in detail and explicitly authorized in a series of secret torture memos drafted by John Yoo, Jay Bybee, and Steven Bradbury, senior lawyers in the DOJ’s Office of Legal Counsel. (Office of Legal Counsel attorneys technically answer directly to the DOJ, which is supposed to be independent from the White House, but obviously was not in this case.) Not one of those men, or their Justice Department bosses, has been held accountable for their actions.
Some tortured prisoners were even killed by the CIA. Attorney General Eric Holder announced recently that no one would be held accountable for those murders either. “Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths,” he said, “the Department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”
Jose Rodriguez, a senior CIA official, admitted destroying videotapes of potentially admissible evidence, showing the torture of captives by operatives of the U.S. government at a secret prison thought to be located at a Vietnam-War-era airbase in Thailand. He was not held accountable for deep-sixing this evidence, nor for his role in the torture of human beings.
John Kiriakou Alone
The one man in the whole archipelago of America’s secret horrors facing prosecution is former CIA agent John Kiriakou. Of the untold numbers of men and women involved in the whole nightmare show of those years, only one may go to jail.
And of course, he didn’t torture anyone.
The charges against Kiriakou allege that in answering questions from reporters about suspicions that the CIA tortured detainees in its custody, he violated the Espionage Act, once an obscure World War I-era law that aimed at punishing Americans who gave aid to the enemy. It was passed in 1917 and has been the subject of much judicial and Congressional doubt ever since. Kiriakou is one of six government whistleblowers who have been charged under the Act by the Obama administration. From 1917 until Obama came into office, only three people had ever charged in this way.
The Obama Justice Department claims the former CIA officer “disclosed classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities.”
The charges result from a CIA investigation. That investigation was triggered by a filing in January 2009 on behalf of detainees at Guantanamo that contained classified information the defense had not been given through government channels, and by the discovery in the spring of 2009 of photographs of alleged CIA employees among the legal materials of some detainees at Guantanamo. According to one description, Kiriakou gave several interviews about the CIA in 2008. Court documents charge that he provided names of covert Agency officials to a journalist, who allegedly in turn passed them on to a Guantanamo legal team. The team sought to have detainees identify specific CIA officials who participated in their renditions and torture. Kiriakou is accused of providing the identities of CIA officers that may have allowed names to be linked to photographs.
Many observers believe however that the real “offense” in the eyes of the Obama administration was quite different. In 2007, Kiriakou became a whistleblower. He went on record as the first (albeit by then, former) CIA official to confirm the use of waterboarding of al-Qaeda prisoners as an interrogation technique, and then to condemn it as torture. He specifically mentioned the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah in that secret prison in Thailand. Zubaydah was at the time believed to be an al-Qaeda leader, though more likely was at best a mid-level operative. Kiriakou also ran afoul of the CIA over efforts to clear for publication a book he had written about the Agency’s counterterrorism work. He maintains that his is instead a First Amendment case in which a whistleblower is being punished, that it is a selective prosecution to scare government insiders into silence when they see something wrong.
If Kiriakou had actually tortured someone himself, even to death, there is no possibility that he would be in trouble. John Kiriakou is staring down a long tunnel of 30 months in jail because in the national security state that rules the roost in Washington, talking out of turn about a crime has become the only possible crime.
Welcome to the Jungle
John Kiriakou and I share common attorneys through the Government Accountability Project, and I’ve had the chance to talk with him on any number of occasions. He is soft-spoken, thoughtful, and quick to laugh at a bad joke. When the subject turns to his case, and the way the government has treated him, however, things darken. His sentences get shorter and the quick smile disappears.
He understands the role his government has chosen for him: the head on a stick, the example, the message to everyone else involved in the horrors of post-9/11 America. Do the country’s dirty work, kidnap, kill, imprison, torture, and we’ll cover for you. Destroy the evidence of all that and we’ll reward you. But speak out, and expect to be punished.
Like so many of us who have served the U.S. government honorably only to have its full force turned against us for an act or acts of conscience, the pain comes in trying to reconcile the two images of the U.S. government in your head. It’s like trying to process the actions of an abusive father you still want to love.
One of Kiriakou’s representatives, attorney Jesselyn Radack, told me, “It is a miscarriage of justice that John Kiriakou is the only person indicted in relation to the Bush-era torture program. The historic import cannot be understated. If a crime as egregious as state-sponsored torture can go unpunished, we lose all moral standing to condemn other governments’ human rights violations. By ‘looking forward, not backward’ we have taken a giant leap into the past.”
One former CIA covert officer, who uses the pen name “Ishmael Jones,” laid out a potential defense for Kiriakou: “Witness after witness could explain to the jury that Mr. Kiriakou is being selectively prosecuted, that his leaks are nothing compared to leaks by Obama administration officials and senior CIA bureaucrats. Witness after witness could show the jury that for any secret material published by Mr. Kiriakou, the books of senior CIA bureaucrats contain many times as much. Former CIA chief George Tenet wrote a book in 2007, approved by CIA censors, that contains dozens of pieces of classified information — names and enough information to find names.”
If only it was really that easy.
Never Again
For at least six years it was the policy of the United States of America to torture and abuse its enemies or, in some cases, simply suspected enemies. It has remained a U.S. policy, even under the Obama administration, to employ “extraordinary rendition” — that is, the sending of captured terror suspects to the jails of countries that are known for torture and abuse, an outsourcing of what we no longer want to do.
Techniques that the U.S. hanged men for at Nuremburg and in post-war Japan were employed and declared lawful. To embark on such a program with the oversight of the Bush administration, learned men and women had to have long discussions, with staffers running in and out of rooms with snippets of research to buttress the justifications being so laboriously developed. The CIA undoubtedly used some cumbersome bureaucratic process to hire contractors for its torture staff. The old manuals needed to be updated, psychiatrists consulted, military survival experts interviewed, training classes set up.
Videotapes were made of the torture sessions and no doubt DVDs full of real horror were reviewed back at headquarters. Torture techniques were even reportedly demonstrated to top officials inside the White House. Individual torturers who were considered particularly effective were no doubt identified, probably rewarded, and sent on to new secret sites to harm more people.
America just didn’t wake up one day and start slapping around some Islamic punk. These were not the torture equivalents of rogue cops. A system, a mechanism, was created. That we now can only speculate about many of the details involved and the extent of all this is a tribute to the thousands who continue to remain silent about what they did, saw, heard about, or were associated with. Many of them work now at the same organizations, remaining a part of the same contracting firms, the CIA, and the military. Our torturers.
What is it that allows all those people to remain silent? How many are simply scared, watching what is happening to John Kiriakou and thinking: not me, I’m not sticking my neck out to see it get chopped off. They’re almost forgivable, even if they are placing their own self-interest above that of their country. But what about the others, the ones who remain silent about what they did or saw or aided and abetted in some fashion because they still think it was the right thing to do? The ones who will do it again when another frightened president asks them to? Or even the ones who enjoyed doing it?
The same Department of Justice that is hunting down the one man who spoke against torture from the inside still maintains a special unit, 60 years after the end of WWII, dedicated to hunting down the last few at-large Nazis. They do that under the rubric of “never again.” The truth is that same team needs to be turned loose on our national security state. Otherwise, until we have a full accounting of what was done in our names by our government, the pieces are all in place for it to happen again. There, if you want to know, is the real horror.
John Kiriakou maintains a personal web page, which includes information on how to donate to his legal expenses fund if you so wish.
Kiriakou, alongside whistleblowers such as Tom Drake and myself, appears in the upcoming documentary SILENCED, now in production. The film explores the steep personal price paid by those who challenge national security policy in post 9-11 America.
Originally published September 11, 2012 on TomDispatch.com, with updates on John’s sentencing.
Copyright © 2020. All rights reserved. The views expressed here are solely those of the author(s) in their private capacity.
An All-American Nightmare
This article was originally published on Salon.com, December 18, 2012
Why Zero Dark Thirty Won’t Settle the Torture Question or Purge Torture From the American System
If you look backward you see a nightmare. If you look forward you become the nightmare.
There’s one particular nightmare that Americans need to face: in the first decade of the twenty-first century we tortured people as national policy. One day, we’re going to have to confront the reality of what that meant, of what effect it had on its victims and on us, too, we who condoned, supported, or at least allowed it to happen, either passively or with guilty (or guiltless) gusto. If not, torture won’t go away. It can’t be disappeared like the body of a political prisoner, or conveniently deep-sixed simply by wishing it elsewhere or pretending it never happened or closing our bureaucratic eyes. After the fact, torture can only be dealt with by staring directly into the nightmare that changed us — that, like it or not, helped make us who we now are.
The president, a Nobel Peace Prize winner, has made it clear that no further investigations or inquiries will be made into America’s decade of torture. His Justice Department failed to prosecute a single torturer or any of those who helped cover up evidence of the torture practices. But it did deliver a jail sentence to one ex-CIA officer who refused to be trained to torture and was among the first at the CIA to publicly admit that the torture program was real.
At what passes for trials at our prison camp in Guantanamo, Cuba, disclosure of the details of torture is forbidden, effectively preventing anyone from learning anything about what the CIA did with its victims. We are encouraged to do what’s best for America and, as Barack Obama put it, “look forward, not backward,” with the same zeal as, after 9/11, we were encouraged to save America by going shopping.
Looking into the Eyes of the Tortured
Torture does not leave its victims, nor does it leave a nation that condones it. As an act, it is all about pain, but even more about degradation and humiliation. It destroys its victims, but also demeans those who perpetrate it. I know, because in the course of my 24 years as a State Department officer, I spoke with two men who had been tortured, both by allies of the United States and with at least the tacit approval of Washington. While these men were tortured, Americans in a position to know chose to look the other way for reasons of politics. These men were not movie characters, but complex flesh-and-blood human beings. Meet just one of them once and, I assure you, you’ll never follow the president’s guidance and move forward trying to forget.
The Korean Poet
The first victim was a Korean poet. I was in Korea at the time as a visa officer working for the State Department at the U.S. Embassy in Seoul. Persons with serious criminal records are normally ineligible to travel to the United States. There is, however, an exception in the law for political crimes. It was initially carved out for Soviet dissidents during the Cold War years. I spoke to the poet as he applied for a visa to determine if his arrest had indeed been “political” and so not a disqualification for his trip to the U.S.
Under the brutal military dictatorship of Park Chung Hee, the poet was tortured for writing anti-government verse. To younger Americans, South Korea is the land of “Gangnam Style,” of fashionable clothing and cool, cool electronics. However, within Psy’s lifetime, his nation was ruled by a series of military autocrats, supported by the United States in the interest of “national security.”
The poet quietly explained to me that, after his work came to the notice of the powers that be, he was taken from his apartment to a small underground cell. Soon, two men arrived and beat him repeatedly on his testicles and sodomized him with one of the tools they had used for the beating. They asked him no questions. In fact, he said, they barely spoke to him at all. Though the pain was beyond his ability to describe, even as a poet, he said that the humiliation of being left so utterly helpless was what remained with him for life, destroyed his marriage, sent him to the repeated empty comfort of alcohol, and kept him from ever putting pen to paper again.
The men who destroyed him, he told me, entered the room, did their work, and then departed, as if they had many others to visit that day and needed to get on with things. The Poet was released a few days later and politely driven back to his apartment by the police in a forward-looking gesture, as if the episode of torture was over and to be forgotten.
The Iraqi Tribal Leader
The second torture victim I met while I was stationed at a forward operating base in Iraq. He was a well-known SOI leader. The SOI, or Sons of Iraq, were Sunni tribesmen who, as part of Iraq War commander General David Petraeus’s much-discussed “Anbar Awakening” agreed to stop killing Americans and, in return for money we paid them, take up arms against al-Qaeda. That was 2007. By 2010, when I met the man, the Sons of Iraq, as Sunnis, had no friends in the Shia-dominated government of Nouri al-Maliki in Baghdad and the U.S. was expediently allowing its Sunni friendships to fade away.
Over dessert one sticky afternoon, the SOI leader told me that he had recently been released from prison. He explained that the government had wanted him off the street in the run-up to a recent election, so that he would not use his political pull to get in the way of a Shia victory. The prison that held him was a secret one, he told me, under the control of some shadowy part of the U.S.-trained Iraqi security forces.
He had been tortured by agents of the Maliki government, supported by the United States in the interest of national security. Masked men bound him at the wrists and ankles and hung him upside-down. He said that they neither asked him any questions nor demanded any information. They whipped his testicles with a leather strap, then beat the bottoms of his feet and the area around his kidneys. They slapped him. They broke the bones in his right foot with a steel rod, a piece of rebar that would ordinarily have been used to reinforce concrete.
It was painful, he told me, but he had felt pain before. What truly wounded him was the feeling of utter helplessness. A man like himself, he stated with an echo of pride, had never felt helpless. His strength was his ability to control things, to stand up to enemies, to fight, and if necessary, to order men to their deaths. Now, he no longer slept well at night, was less interested in life and its activities, and felt little pleasure. He showed me his blackened toenails, as well as the caved in portion of his foot, which still bore a rod-like indentation with faint signs of metal grooves. When he paused and looked across the room, I thought I could almost see the movie running in his head.
Alone in the Dark
I encountered those two tortured men, who described their experiences so similarly, several years and thousands of miles apart. All they really had in common was being tortured and meeting me. They could, of course, have been lying about, or exaggerating, what had happened to them. I have no way to verify their stories because in neither country were their torturers ever brought to justice. One man was tortured because he was considered a threat to South Korea, the other to Iraq. Those “threatened” governments were among the company the U.S. keeps, and they were known torturers, regularly justifying such horrific acts, as we would also do in the first years of the twenty-first century, in the name of security. In our case, actual torture techniques would reportedly be demonstrated to some of the highest officials in the land in the White House itself, then “legalized,” and carried out in global “black sites” and foreign prisons.
A widely praised new movie about the assassination of Osama bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty, opens with a series of torture scenes. The victims are various Muslims and al-Qaeda suspects, and the torturers are members of the U.S. government working for the CIA. We see a prisoner strapped to the wall, bloody, with his pants pulled down in front of a female CIA officer. We see another having water poured into his mouth and lungs until he wretches in agony (in what during the Middle Ages was bluntly called “the Water Torture,” later “the water cure,” or more recently “waterboarding”). We see men shoved forcibly into tiny confinement boxes that do not allow them to sit, stand, or lie down.
These are were among the techniques of torture “lawfully” laid out in a CIA Inspector General’s report, some of which would have been alarmingly familiar to the tortured men I spoke with, as they might be to Bradley Manning, held isolated, naked, and without sleep in U.S. military prisons in a bid to break his spirit.
The movie scenes are brutal, yet sanitized. As difficult to watch as the images are, they show nothing beyond the infliction of pain. Horrific as it may be, pain fades, bones mend, bruises heal. No, don’t for a second think that the essence of torture is physical pain, no matter what Zero Dark Thirty implies. If, in many cases, the body heals, mental wounds are a far more difficult matter. Memory persists.
The obsessive debate in this country over the effectiveness of torture rings eternally false: torture does indeed work. After all, it’s not just about eliciting information — sometimes, as in the case of the two men I met, it’s not about information at all. Torture is, however, invariably about shame and vengeance, humiliation, power, and control. We’re just slapping you now, but we control you and who knows what will happen next, what we’re capable of? “You lie to me, I hurt you,” says a CIA torturer in Zero Dark Thirty to his victim. The torture victim is left to imagine what form the hurt will take and just how severe it will be, almost always in the process assuming responsibility for creating his own terror. Yes, torture “works” — to destroy people.
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, accused 9/11 “mastermind,” was waterboarded 183 times. Al-Jazeera journalist Sami al-Haj spent six years in the Guantanamo Bay prison, stating, “They used dogs on us, they beat me, sometimes they hung me from the ceiling and didn’t allow me to sleep for six days.” Brandon Neely, a U.S. military policeman and former Guantanamo guard, watched a medic there beat an inmate he was supposed to treat. CIA agents tortured a German citizen, a car salesman named Khaled el-Masri, who was picked up in a case of mistaken identity, sodomizing, shackling, and beating him, holding him in total sensory deprivation, as Macedonian state police looked on, so the European Court of Human Rights found last week.
Others, such as the Court of Human Rights or the Senate Intelligence Committee, may give us glimpses into the nightmare of official American policy in the first years of this century. Still, our president refuses to look backward and fully expose the deeds of that near-decade to sunlight; he refuses to truly look forward and unambiguously renounce forever the use of anything that could be seen as an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Since he also continues to support robustly the precursors to torture — the “extraordinary rendition” of captured terror suspects to allied countries that are perfectly happy to torture them and indefinite detention by decree — we cannot fully understand what men like the Korean poet and the Iraqi tribal leader already know on our behalf: we are torturers and unless we awaken to confront the nightmare of what we are continuing to become, it will eventually transform and so consume us.
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