Tag: Guantanamo

AP reports that charges have been dropped against the alleged “Twentieth Hijacker”, Mohammed al-Qahtani:

The Pentagon has dropped charges against a Saudi at Guantanamo who was alleged to have been the so-called “20th hijacker” in the Sept. 11 attacks, his U.S. military defense lawyer said Monday.

Mohammed al-Qahtani was one of six men charged by the military in February with murder and war crimes for their alleged roles in the 2001 attacks. Authorities say al-Qahtani missed out on taking part in the attacks because he was denied entry to the U.S. by an immigration agent.

But in reviewing the case, the convening authority for military commissions, Susan Crawford, decided to dismiss the charges against al-Qahtani and proceed with the arraignment for the other five, said Army Lt. Col. Bryan Broyles, the Saudi’s military lawyer.

The charges were dropped without prejudice, meaning that they could be reinstated.  al-Qahtani was to face the death penalty, along with five others, in trials before Military Commissions at Guantanamo.

Why were the charges dropped?  Because al-Qahtani had been tortured. Of course, Crawford did not say.  And his lawyer couldn’t comment yet.  

Officials previously said al-Qahtani had been subjected to a harsh interrogation authorized by former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. /snip

U.S. authorities have acknowledged that Mohammed was subjected to waterboarding by CIA interrogators and that al-Qahtani was treated harshly at Guantanamo.

Al-Qahtani last fall recanted a confession he said he made after he was tortured and humiliated at Guantanamo.

The alleged torture, which he detailed in a written statement, included being beaten, restrained for long periods in uncomfortable positions, threatened with dogs, exposed to loud music and freezing temperatures and stripped nude in front of female personnel.

Yesterday, Monday April 28, 2008, the man who used to be the Chief Prosecutor at Guantanamo  gave sworn testimony that puts the lie to the farce of the of the Military Commissions AcT (MCA) proceedings being used to try alleged terrorists. Col. Morris Davis told the tribunal hearing the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan that

Defense Department general counsel William J. Haynes II, who announced his retirement in February, once bristled at the suggestion that some defendants could be acquitted, an outcome that Davis said would give the process added legitimacy.

“He said, ‘We can’t have acquittals,’ ” Davis said under questioning from Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, the military counsel who represents Hamdan. ” ‘We’ve been holding these guys for years. How can we explain acquittals? We have to have convictions.’ “

(Note, there is no transcript available at this time.)

Following a pivotal article by Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly a few weeks back, today’s Washington Post published an important article today, “Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned.” The story, by Post staff writer Joby Warrick, notes U.S. denials in using drug injections for coercive purposes during interrogations.

Adel al-Nusairi, a Saudi national imprisoned for years at Guanatanmo, and now released without charges, has a different memory:

“I’d fall asleep” after the shot, Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his attorney at the military prison in Cuba, according to notes. After being roused, Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S. officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some peace.

“I was completely gone,” he remembered. “I said, ‘Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I’m a member of al-Qaeda, I will.'”

The New York Times this morning is reporting that Afghanistan is holding secret trials for dozens of Afghan men who were formerly detained by the US in Gitmo and Baghram:

Dozens of Afghan men who were previously held by the United States at Bagram Air Base and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, are now being tried [in Afghanistan] in secretive Afghan criminal proceedings based mainly on allegations forwarded by the American military.

The prisoners are being convicted and sentenced to as much as 20 years’ confinement in trials that typically run between half an hour and an hour, said human rights investigators who have observed them. One early trial was reported to have lasted barely 10 minutes, an investigator said. /snip

Witnesses do not appear in court and cannot be cross-examined. There are no sworn statements of their testimony.

Instead, the trials appear to be based almost entirely on terse summaries of allegations that are forwarded to the Afghan authorities by the United States military. Afghan security agents add what evidence they can, but the cases generally center on events that sometimes occurred years ago in war zones that the authorities may now be unable to reach.

“These are no-witness paper trials that deny the defendants a fundamental fair-trial right to challenge the evidence and mount a defense,” said Sahr MuhammedAlly, a lawyer for the advocacy group Human Rights First who has studied the proceedings. “So any convictions you get are fundamentally flawed.”

Join me below.

Master Thomas at length said he would stand it no longer. I had lived with him nine months, during which time he had given me a number of severe whippings, all to no good purpose. He resolved to put me out, as he said, to be broken; and, for this purpose, he let me for one year to a man named Edward Covey. Mr. Covey was a poor man, a farm-renter. He rented the place upon which he lived, as also the hands with which he tilled it. Mr. Covey had acquired a very high reputation for breaking young slaves, and this reputation was of immense value to him … Added to the natural good qualities of Mr. Covey, he was a professor of religion–a pious soul–a member and a class-leader in the Methodist church. All of this added weight to his reputation as a “nigger-breaker.” I was aware of all the facts, having been made acquainted with them by a young man who had lived there. I nevertheless made the change gladly; for I was sure of getting enough to eat, which is not the smallest consideration to a hungry man.

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

Via Raw Story

Top Bush Administration officials pressured underlings to use torture tactics at Guantanamo

Of Guantanamo interrogators: “You could almost see their dicks getting hard as they got new ideas.”

“Torture at Guantanamo was sanctioned by the most senior advisers to the president, the vice president, and the secretary of defense, according to the international lawyer and professor of law at University College London Philippe Sands, who has conducted a forensic examination of the chain of command leading from the top of the administration to the camp at Guantánamo,” Vanity Fair will report on newstands today.

The article directly contradicts the administration’s account to Congress, which placed responsibility on military commanders and interrogators on the ground for the practices banned by the Geneva Conventions.

Raw Story has an excerpt, go read.

Lets see Saddam, even though we installed and supported him, Had To Go. Because he Arrested the Innocent and his ‘Henchmen’ Tortured and Killed many of those arrested, as well as Killing and Maiming Tens of Thousands of Iraqi’s. Those are only a Couple of the many ‘Nobel Cause’ Reasons for the Righteousness of Invading, Destroying, and Occupying Iraq for our National Security!

Polonius: What do you read, my lord?

Hamlet: Words, words, words.

Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?

Hamlet: Between who?

Sometimes it seems as if it is raining news and analysis. A number of good articles have appeared lately on the subject of U.S. torture. David Goodman’s “The Enablers” over at Mother Jones is one of a number of articles in a special MJ series on torture. Goodman’s article focuses on the fight within the American Psychological Association (APA) over psychologist participation in military and CIA interrogations of “enemy combatants.” It’s very good, fairly up-to-date, and puts the controversy into some historical context.

Another article, by Stephen Soldz and Brad Olson — both psychologists and both active in the APA opposition organization, Psychologists for an Ethical APA — has been published online over at ZNet. Its long title, “A Reaction to the APA Vote on Sealing Up Key Loopholes in the 2007 Resolution on Interrogations,” tips you off that there has been some recent activity in the struggle to change APA policy on psychologists and interrogation. Indeed there has been, as last week APA Council voted to approve a substantial change in their previous language on prohibited interrogation techniques. But will it make a difference in the long run?

The New York Times today reports that Justice Department is going to investigate the Justice Department’s approval of the CIA’s use of waterboarding torture:

The Justice Department revealed Friday that its internal ethics office was investigating the department’s legal approval for waterboarding of Qaeda suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency and was likely to make public an unclassified version of its report.

The disclosure by H. Marshall Jarrett, the head of the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility, was the first official acknowledgment of an internal review of the legal memorandums the department has issued since 2002 that authorized waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods.

Mr. Jarrett’s report could become the first public accounting for legal advice that endorsed methods widely denounced as torture by human rights groups and legal authorities. His office can refer matters for criminal prosecution; legal experts said the most likely outcome was a public critique of the legal opinions on interrogation, noting that Mr. Jarrett had the power to reprimand or to seek the disbarment of current or former Justice Department lawyers.

You’ll pardon me, please, for not dancing in the streets.  “Waterboarding” shouldn’t be the focus of the inquiry.  The focus should be on torture in all of its forms and in all of the locations where it might be practiced (including Gitmo, Black Sites, Diego Garcia) and all of the agencies of the Governmetn and their contractors who might be using it.  And we don’t really need an “unclassified version of a report” about how torture was approved.  We need an end to torture. Period.  And we need criminal prosecution of all of those who approved it.

Some context, if you will:

*C.I.A. director Michael V. Hayden admitted a couple of weeks ago that the CIA used waterboarding in 2002 and 2003 on 3 prisoners but claimed that the CIA didn’t do that any more and that the legality of what it did was “uncertain.”

*Attorney General Mukasey refused to launch a criminal investigation of those who used torture waterboarding or of their superiors, because CIA employees couldn’t be prosecuted for things Justice had told them were legal.  Jarrett’s review focuses on the government lawyers who gave that advice.

*According to the Times, prosecutors and F.B.I. agents have launched a criminal investigation of the C.I.A.’s destruction in 2005 of videotapes of harsh interrogations torture and a week after Congress passed a ban on coercive interrogations, which President Bush has said he will veto.

According to the Times:

In a letter to two Democratic senators, Richard J. Durbin of Illinois and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island, Mr. Jarrett wrote that the legal advice approving waterboarding was one subject of an investigation into “the circumstances surrounding the drafting” of a Justice legal memorandum dated Aug. 1, 2002.

The document declared that interrogation methods were not torture unless they produced pain equivalent to that produced by organ failure or death. The memorandum, drafted by a Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, and signed by Jay S. Bybee, then head of the department’s Office of Legal Counsel, was withdrawn in 2004.

Mr. Jarrett said the investigation was also covering “related” legal memorandums prepared by the Office of Legal Counsel since 2002. That suggested the investigation would address still-secret legal opinions written in 2005 by Steven G. Bradbury, then and now the acting head of the Office of Legal Counsel, that gave legal approval for waterboarding and other tough methods, even when used in combination.

We know about the Yoo and Bybee memoranda and how they were altered in 2004.  We know about the Bradbury opinions.  Doubtless there are others as well. Don’t we know that those reached barbaric, incorrect conclusions about the legality of torture?

Mr. Jarrett said his office was “examining whether the legal advice in these memoranda was consistent with the professional standards that apply to Department of Justice attorneys.”

Doh.  We don’t need a further, public investigation of these opinions that might endanger prosecution of these individuals.  We need to prosecute them.  The public investigation is a day late and more than a dollar short.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

This Is What Torture Looks Like

How gullible are we?  How much nonsense will we consider truthful?  How many lies and contradictions and just plain nonsense about torture do we need to be told before we say, “Basta ya!  Enough already!”  The photo clearly depicts the torture of detainees prisoners at Guantanamo: stress positions and sensory deprivation.  But today the WaPo reports that Bushco says its activities don’t really cross the line and aren’t quite torture.

Join me behind the razor wire.

Cross-posted on kos

Nicholas Kristof may be the most maddening of all the New York Times columnists.  His last two columns illustrate this perfectly. Last Thursday, he wrote a great column on the torture and incarceration of Sami al-Hajj  It was a rare traditional media expose and attack on this underreported story.  I wrote a comment to the piece suggesting that he do a follow-up column noting that Congress had just passed an anti-torture bill, but candidate McCain had voted no.

Today, his column is an inexplicable Valentine to McCain that excuses all of his pandering on numerous issues, and mentions merely in passing that he just voted for torture!