Crossposted at Invictus

More than one author has described writing about the intelligence world as akin to walking into a hall of mirrors. It’s difficult to know what’s what, who to believe, or even know where you stand. Truths are fungible. Lies are opaque versions of tomorrow’s news.

When the U.S. released its limited version of the latest National Intelligence Estimate on Iran, the revelation that Iran does not have a working nuclear arms program landed with a thud upon the collective heads of the D.C. pundits. Bush’s pugnacious news conference which followed, wherein he repeated ad nauseaum his intention that Iran never get the “knowledge” to construct a nuclear weapon, signalled no real change in direction from the administration that was only weeks before dangling World War III before the glazed eyes of a fearful electorate.

In discussions with colleagues, I was struck by the fact that the authorship of the new NIE was from the same man who wrote the previous NIE, and the same man who assured the administration that there was a nuclear weapons program in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, CIA stalwart, Robert Walpole, who was (if he in fact is still), according to the Washington Post, “chief CIA officer for nuclear programs”. In other words, I smelled a rat.  

Also posted at Daily Kos, NION, and Invictus

First it was the leak of the 2003 Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) Manual for Guantanamo. The SOP included procedures for psychological torture and abusive conditions of detention, including long-term isolation to foster dependence upon interrogators and “enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process”. Also, prisoners were hidden from the International Red Cross.

The military assured critics that “SOPs by definition, undergo periodic review and change as situations warrant. Detention operations at JTF-GTMO have evolved significantly since 2003…”

Now Wikileaks has released a copy of the 2004 SOP, and guess what? Nothing changed, unless (mostly) for the worse! As the Washington Post notes, since the Supreme Court “prepares to hear arguments this week on the rights of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the public is getting another peek at how detainees have been treated there.”

(The following was first posted on January 7, 2007 at the Daily Kos website. It is being reprinted here as of significant interest to readers of this blog. I have no reason to believe that anything important has changed since this article was originally written. One exception might be the peregrinations undertaken by the American Psychological Association on the question of interrogations, which can be followed in numerous other articles at my blog. Another exception would be revelations that emerged during the year regarding psychologist participation in U.S. government torture, and this additional material is included in the following text in the form of an editorial emendation.)

I recently came across an FBI report on a conference jointly sponsored by the FBI and the American Psychological Association. Given the recent and ongoing controversies over the use of psychologists and other medical personnel in U.S. torture programs abroad, I thought a close examination of the matter of this conference could be interesting. — What you will read may shock you (especially if you are interested in mental health practice). It will certainly enlighten you, and help fill in the gaps that exist in our understanding of U.S. interrogation techniques, the “war on terror”, and the government campaign to curtail our liberties.

Reuters has just posted a story that should make Americans stand up and take notice — assuming they can bestir their self-interested torpor — as the Senlis Council, a well-respected international think-tank, has released a report, “Stumbling into Chaos: Afghanistan on the Brink”, which argues the situation in Afghanistan has reached “crisis proportions”. This follows the revelations last month from a top British politician and former UN representative in the Balkans that the war in Afghanistan is “lost”.

Canadian Television summed up the conclusions in the Senlis report this way (all emphases in quotes throughout are mine):

*** The Taliban are winning hearts and minds in southern Afghanistan; the international community is not. NATO-ISAF troops are forced to fight in an increasingly hostile environment because of the international community’s blunt political errors.

*** The absence of comprehensive development aid plans has given a strategic advantage to the Taliban.

*** Time for a well-planned village by village hearts and minds campaign to re-engage the Afghan population and make NATO’s mission a successful one.

Also posted at Invictus

Once again, the indefatigable Stephen Soldz has jumped out on the Guantanamo SOP story, providing readers with important analysis on exactly what is in that document, and how it links to what we already know about U.S. torture policies. He also discusses the document in the light of the struggle he and other psychologists have waged in the American Psychological Association against the latter’s collaborationist policy of staffing the interrogation rooms and prisons of Bush’s anti-democratic and bloody “war on terror”.

This is from his latest article, “Leaked Guantanamo Document Confirms Routine Use of Isolation as Psychological Torture”, posted yesterday at ZNet.

The Guantanamo SOP now provides official documentation that, at the time of the Rumsfeld memo and despite its warnings regarding the techniques’ potential illegality and physical and psychological dangers, isolation was routinely used by the Defense Department at Guantanamo on all new detainees. The Rumsfeld memo complements the SOP in that it documents the central role of “medical and psychological review,” and, thus, medical and psychological personnel in the administration of this technique….

I can’t access the Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures manual leaked the other day. It could be demand is so high it crashed the servers at Wikileaks. (Here’s an alternate link.) I wanted to check more on what I’m hearing is in all those hundreds of pages, including the fact that the initial period of isolation of prisoners is four, not two weeks in length. Also, other reports are describing, for instance, the use of military dogs with prisoners to “enhance physical security and as a psychological deterrent”. Both the ACLU and the Center for Human Rights are reported to have lawyers looking carefully at the document.

For those of use who have been protesting within the American Psychological Association (APA) about its policy of permitting psychologists to work in “war on terror” interrogation centers like Guantanamo, the Delta SOP is of more than passing interest. Colonel Larry James, who spoke against a moratorium resolution (banning psychologist participation in interrogations at places like Guantanamo) at the last APA conference, warning that without psychologists involved in the interrogation process “people are going to die” (meaning prisoners, I suppose; he wasn’t clear), was Chief Psychologist with the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantanamo during the period the controversial SOP was in operation. The APA has defended Colonel James to the present day, and even put him forward as someone who helped blunt human rights abuses at the facility.

Also posted at Invictus

Troutfishing has a very good article over at Daily Kos on the near-takeover by right-wing Christian evangelicals of the U.S. Air Force Academy. Religious ideology and imagery has long mingled with military rhetoric, as my article yesterday on General Matthew Ridgway and the Korean War demonstrates. But as recent investigations make clear, there is an organizational effort to maximize religious influence in the U.S. military, something beyond the chiliastic comments of a 1950s Cold War general.

In a July 12, 2005 interview with the New York Times, Brig. Gen. Cecil Richardson, Air Force deputy chief of chaplains, stated, "…we reserve the right to evangelize the unchurched." For over a decade, the official [US Air Force] academy newspaper ran ads stating: "We believe that Jesus Christ is the only real hope for the World. If you would like to discuss Jesus, feel free to contact one of us! There is salvation in no other name under heaven given among mortals by which we must be saved." The ads were signed by 16 department heads, nine permanent professors, both the incoming and outgoing deans of faculty, the athletic director and more than 200 academy senior officers and their spouses.

(from an article published on Truthdig, The Cancer From Within, by Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) board member and decorated Vietnam War pilot David Antoon)

In January 1951, General Matthew Ridgway was appointed the new commander for the Eighth Army in Korea. U.S. forces had suffered setback after setback after a Chinese and North Korean offensive drove U.S. and UN forces back from nearby the Yalu River and well south of the 38th parallel into South Korea. Only months before, General Douglas MacArthur had promised that the troops would be home by Christmas. But by December 4, 1950, things had gotten so bad the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff had approved President Truman’s decision to use atomic weapons, if necessary, to avoid possible defeat.

General Ridgway, who ultimately would take over from MacArthur, was a World War II hero, and considered something of a character. When in public, “he always had a hand grenade attached to one shoulder strap on his battle jacket, and a first aid kit on the other.” The strange regalia earned him the nickname “Old Iron Tits.”

Larry Johnson over at Daily Kos has released a letter to the chairman and ranking minority member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, calling for a hold on Mukasey’s nomination for Attorney General until Judge Mukasey clarifies his position on waterboarding. They ridicule Mukasey’s claim of ignorance on the subject, and suggest a classified briefing for him and other Committee leaders, which would be taped in order to “enhance the likelihood of candor”. Johnson is a former Intelligence analysis and operations officer, and was deputy director of Office of Counter Terrorism at the U.S. State Department.

The letter follows the news last Friday that Democratic Senators Feinstein and Schumer said they would vote to recommend Mukasey out of committee. The memorandum from assorted former intelligence operatives from the CIA/FBI/DIA and State Department is full of lofty calls for a return to American values and a return to the “high moral ground” supposedly held previously by the U.S. military and CIA. One only has to contemplate the history of the CIA, of how the U.S. government has trained torturers around the world, of the U.S. unprovoked invasions of Iraq and Vietnam with deaths in the millions, of the torture-assassination program that was Operation Phoenix, in addition to the fact the agents’s memorandum says nothing about other forms of torture, or about the CIA extraordinary rendition program, to recognize the bogus nature of such previously held moral values and positions.

The letter itself is worth publishing as an example of the rebellion within the governmental bureaucracy against the hard-line Bush/Cheney cabal, for whom anything goes. You can bet that these former government spooks wouldn’t have published if there wasn’t some support for their position within the active military and intelligence community.

The memorandum also demonstrates that political opposition to the Mukasey nomination hasn’t totally crumbled in the wake of Feinstein and Schumer’s genuflection to Bush. Johnson says this letter can be posted “at any blog or site, in full”, asking only for attribution to No Quarter. What follows is the full text of this letter to the Judiciary Committee:

Crossposted at Invictus and Daily Kos

Like a scenario out of an Alfred Hitchcock movie, an innocent man was accused of assisting the 9/11 hijackers in their terrorist plot. Abdallah Higazy was an Egyptian national studying computer engineering at Polytechnic University in Brooklyn. In December 2001, he was coerced into falsely confessing his “role” in 9/11 after the FBI was tipped that he supposedly owned an air-band transceiver capable of air-to-air and air-to-ground communication.

The transceiver turned out to belong to an airline pilot staying in Abdallah’s NY hotel. Higazy was released after 34 days in custody. He subsequently sued both his FBI interrogator and the hotel he stayed in, whose security officers had found the radio. The hotel settled, but initially the FBI suit was dismissed. Upon appeal, the 2nd Circuit remanded the case to district court.

Now here’s what’s really amazing: the court brief clearly shows that the FBI threatened torture of Higazy’s family back in Egypt. When the brief was published online, it was quickly withdrawn and replaced with a censored version, without the torture threats. Blogger Howard Bashman had the first version however, posted it, and then received a call from the court demanding he take down the unredacted version.

You can help save an innocent man’s life.

His Guantanamo detainee ID number is 654. His first Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) unanimously concluded there was no evidence he was ever an “enemy combatant”, and yet he has languished in isolation and sensory deprivation for 5 years in notorious Camp 6 at Guantanamo Prison in a steel windowless room, with no charges ever brought against him.

Forty-five year old Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi was diagnosed with hepatitis B and tuberculosis over a year ago. Amnesty International has issued a worldwide alert, as his condition has deteriorated significantly, and the prison authorities refuse to allow treatment. Please read the following and consider contacting the authorities indicated. A man’s life is at stake… and a country’s soul. [Update at end of essay]