12.12.08
Posted in News of the World, What I'm Reading, Torture, Covert Action, Politics at 11:44 pm by Spencer
Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Ranking Member John McCain (R-Ariz.) today released the executive summary and conclusions of the Committee’s report of its inquiry into the treatment of detainees in US custody. The remainder of the report remains classified.
The Committee concluded that the authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques by senior officials was both a direct cause of detainee abuse and conveyed the message that it was okay to mistreat and degrade detainees in US custody.
In the course of its more than 18-month long investigation, the Committee reviewed hundreds of thousands of documents and conducted extensive interviews with more than 70 individuals.
A joint statement released by Levin and McCain emphasized the abuses were directly the result of decisions and orders made at the highest levels of the Bush Administration. “Attempts by senior officials to pass the buck to low ranking soldiers while avoiding any responsibility for abuses are unconscionable. The message from top officials was clear; it was acceptable to use degrading and abusive techniques against detainees,” Sen. Levin said in the statement.
The report’s executive summary, the only part to be released publicly, lays blame squarely at the feet of President Bush, former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and top generals (including Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez and Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller) who reinforced the message personally to their commands.
“Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002 authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques and subsequent interrogation policies and plans approved by senior military and civilian officials conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees in U.S. military custody.”
Senate Armed Services Committee Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in US Custody
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12.10.08
Posted in News of the World, Torture, Spooks, Covert Action, Politics, Intelligence Ops and History at 1:57 am by Spencer
“Matthew Alexander” (a pseudonym used “for security reasons”) wrote this recent Washington Post Op-Ed piece. According to the Post’s capsule bio, he “led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006,” essentially batting clean-up after the Abu Ghraib scandal. Coincidentally, “Alexander” has written a new book: How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.
In a recent (Dec. 3, 2008) interview with Amy Goodman on her program Democracy Now, “Alexander” described excessive Pentagon censorship, including quotes from an unclassified field manual and even items directly from the Army’s own Web site. Out of 93 extensive redactions, 13 were rescinded following a law suit, but not in time for the first printing of the book.
I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq
By Matthew Alexander
Washington Post
Sunday, November 30, 2008; page B01
I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I’m still alarmed about that today.
I’m not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me — both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn’t work.
Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi’s forces (members of Iraq’s Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq’s majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.
Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.
I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology — one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.
Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.
Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.
Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war’s biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi’s associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader’s location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.
But Zarqawi’s death wasn’t enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.
I know the counter-argument well — that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that’s not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, “I thought you would torture me, and when you didn’t, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That’s why I decided to cooperate.”
Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.
I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.
After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material — including passages copied verbatim from the Army’s unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army’s own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don’t even want the public to hear them.
My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war — one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can’t force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I’ll say to them, “Which one?”
Americans, including officers like myself, must fight to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them. Other interrogators are also speaking out, including some former members of the military, the FBI and the CIA who met last summer to condemn torture and have spoken before Congress — at considerable personal risk.
We’re told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations — and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.
I’m actually quite optimistic these days, in no small measure because President-elect Barack Obama has promised to outlaw the practice of torture throughout our government. But until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning. Zarqawi is dead, but he has still forced us to show the world that we do not adhere to the principles we say we cherish. We’re better than that. We’re smarter, too.
howtobreakaterrorist@gmail.com
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05.10.06
Posted in What I'm Reading, Torture, Spooks, Covert Action, Politics at 8:21 pm by Spencer
The McGeorge School of Law at the University of the Pacific has launched a new quarterly, the Journal of National Security Law and Policy, now in its second issue. For now, at least, they’re posting all articles as PDFs for free download, so if’n you’re interested — and you should be — get on over there.
The journal focuses on “questions of war and terrorism, international relations, democracy, and civil liberties.” While peer-reviewed and faculty edited, its authorial base is broader than might be expected, reaching “across doctrinal lines by involving academics from disciplines other than law, as well as members of the military, intelligence, law enforcement, and civil liberties communities.”
The current issue includes papers from two symposia, one on “Fighting Terrorism with Torture: Where to Draw the Line?” and the second on “Lawyers’ Roles in the War on Terror.” Topics include Abu Ghraib (facetiously titled “‘Just for Fun’”), examinations of the CIA’s current role in torture and of the Military Commissions (”Should Lawyers Participate in Rigged Systems?”), and the ramifications of the notorious 2002 “torture memo” issued by the White House Office of Legal Counsel. See why you should be interested?
The legal aspects of the War on Terror ™ in general, the sweeping reinterpretations (cough) of law and treaty obligations staked out by the Bush Administration, the to-date compliant — nay, the treasonously collaborationist — attitude of Congress, the GOP’s highyl successful packing of the federal judiciary with ideological neanderthals, and the domestic and international implications of it all mean that the Journal of National Security Law & Policy — or at least its focus — is something to pay very close attention to.
And while such journals may sometimes make for dry reading, if you’ve got four neurons to rub together, can read at a freshman collegiate level, and have access to Google for the toughies and tangents you can easily understand this sort of fare.
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04.28.06
Posted in News of the World, What I'm Reading, Torture, Spooks, Covert Action at 12:17 am by Spencer
This really is gravely serious. Please act IMMEDIATELY: contact your Congressional Representative and tell them to oppose this terrifying and utterly irresponsible slide into a Gestapo state. Find/contact your Representative via http://www.house.gov/writerep/
The House version of the 2007 intelligence authorization bill — H.R. 5020 — would grant CIA and NSA security personnel the authority to make “warrantless arrests” for “any felony” committed in their presence, no matter how remote from the foreign intelligence mission it might be or where they occurred, the Baltimore Sun reported on April 25, 2006.
Section 432 of the bill grants similar authority to NSA security personnel.
For more info, see:
http://www.fas.org/blog/secrecy/2006/04/house_poised_to_grant_arrest_p.html
and
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.spies25apr25,0,5928384.story
For the full bill –HR 5020 — see http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:H.R.5020:
(Relevant excerpts are also quoted below.)
This legislation would create what can only be characterized as a secret police force controlled directly by the President. This is precisely the American Gestapo that the Republicans themselves warned about when Truman first sought to create the CIA in 1945.
There are two (count ‘em) fig leaves in the legislation, both meaningless. First, the power of warrentless arrest would apply “only” to “personnel designated to carry out protective functions.” A literalist reading of this would equate to security personnel; in practice there is nothing to prevent the Director of Central Intelligence (Porter Goss, a partisan Republican warrior whose leadership had sharply divided the CIA) from “designating” every employee, agent, and asset of the CIA as having a “protective function.” Second (albeit not quoted below), the DCI’s and NSA director’s “policies” must be in line with “policies” promulgated by the Attorney General. But considering that our current Atty. Gen., Alberto Gonzales, signed on to the notion that no law or treaty or Constitutional provison in any way restricts the President from authorizing torture and, jeepers, unilateral secret detention of anyone anywhere, this is obviously a distinction without a difference.
Let us review the basic current situation:
* The President has claimed for himself the power to hold anyone, including any US citizen, in secret detention “exempt” from habeas corpus protection.
* The President claims the courts have no jurisdiction. After the Supreme Court challenged this, Congress recently passed a law (still untested in the courts) specifically declaring that the courts have no jurisdiction over such “detentions”.
* Ever-mounting evidence from multiple independent sources makes it undeniable that A) an unknown but presumably large number of persons have been abducted by US intelligence and military personnel, and B) an extensive “black” network of airplanes is secretly transporting these abductees to third countries for incarceration, interrogation, and torture (otherwise…why do it at all, and why fire CIA analysts for allegedly leaking the info)
* In January 2005, Newsweek reported senior Pentagon counterinsurgency planners were seriously considering what they referred to as “The Salvador Option” for Iraq — meaning creating and controlling death squads just as had been done throughout Latin America during the latter years of the Cold War. Less than a year later, the first press reports began to surface of death squad activity in Iraq, believed to be tied to the Iraqi Interior Ministry.
* The Bush Administration has made it abundantly clear that it makes little or no distinction between tactics and strategies that can/should be applied abroad vs. domestically.
* The “warrantless arrest” provision was inserted into the bill at the request of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte. As US Ambassador to Honduras during the 1980s, Negroponte helped facilitate and cover-up, you guessed it, death squad activities in Latin America.
* There have been numerous accurate reports in recent months of sweeping abuses of power in the “war on terror” directly targeting the homeland population.
Now the House wants to grant arrest powers to the CIA and the NSA??!?!?!
SPECIFIC LANGUAGE:
H.R.5020
Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2007 (Engrossed as Agreed to or Passed by House)
SEC. 423. ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONS AND AUTHORITIES FOR PROTECTIVE PERSONNEL OF THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY.
[…snip…]
(b) Authority to Arrest-
(1) Chapter 203 of title 18, United States Code, is amended by adding at the end the following:
`Sec. 3065. Powers of authorized personnel in the Central Intelligence Agency
`(a) The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency may issue regulations to allow personnel designated to carry out protective functions for the Central Intelligence Agency under section 5(a)(4) of the Central Intelligence Agency Act of 1949 (50 U.S.C. 403f) to, while engaged in such protective functions, make arrests without a warrant for any offense against the United States committed in the presence of such personnel, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States, if such personnel have probable cause to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing that felony offense.
[…snip…]
SEC. 432. CODIFICATION OF AUTHORITIES OF NATIONAL SECURITY AGENCY PROTECTIVE PERSONNEL.
[…snip…]
(b) Authority to Arrest-
(1) Chapter 203 of title 18, United States Code, as amended by section 423 of this Act, is amended by adding at the end the following:
`Sec. 3066. Powers of authorized personnel in the National Security Agency
`(a) The Director of the National Security Agency may issue regulations to allow personnel designated to carry out protective functions for the Agency to–
`(1) carry firearms; and
`(2) make arrests without warrant for any offense against the United States committed in the presence of such personnel, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States, if such personnel have probable cause to believe that the person to be arrested has committed or is committing that felony offense.
[…end quote…]
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02.27.06
Posted in What I'm Reading, Torture, Spooks, Politics at 8:12 pm by Spencer
Yep, here’s Spence with another light read. “The Torture Papers” by Jane Mayer, the featured article in the latest issue of The New Yorker, traces the dismaying tale of (now-former) US Navy general counsel Alberto J. Mora and the circular-file fate of his damning 22-page secret memo, which dared to call out the Pentagon for formulating a systematic policy of torture.
The article makes quite it clear that (duh) Rumsfeld and the Cheney Cabal knew exactly what they were doing: implementing a policy of systematic torture. Mora it makes in quite clear that they are criminals in the eyes of duly-enacted and standing US law, their equally tortured “interpretations” of presidential power notwithstanding.
And how’s this for irony? Mora retired from the military in January, 2006. His job now? General counsel for Wal-Mart’s international operations. …Brain…Hurts…
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02.24.06
Posted in News of the World, What I'm Reading, Torture, Spooks at 12:56 am by Spencer
Astute students of contemporary political history will recognize Alfred McCoy as the author of one of the most important works of the last 50 years, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, a book that for the first time (well, except for Allen Ginsberg’s work on the subject) laid bare in copious, empirical detail and beyond refute that the CIA has a long history of being in active cahoots with drug dealers. Ain’t read it? Shame on you. Required reading (preferrably the second edition), even if it is rather hefty.
McCoy’s latest book, just out and another must-read, is titled A Question of Torture (Henry Holt & Co., 2006), which I happen to have just started and, even this early on, very highly recommend. As we have come to expect of Prof. McCoy, it is scrupulously documented and deeply disturbing. Currently I’m only on chapter 2, but already I’m impressed with his conscision and perspicacity. He — quite rightly — begins with the CIA’s early mind control and interrogation experiments (BLUEBIRD, ARTICHOKE, MK-ULTRA, MK-DELTA, MK-NAOMI, and others) and works from there to trace the profoundly disturbing but vitally important suppressed history of our government’s decades-long dance with the Dark Side viz. torture.
Most importantly, per our current situation as citizens of an ostensible democratic republic, McCoy makes it crystal clear from the get-go (again with that assiduous documentation) that seemingly innoccuous Gitmo ploys like hooding “detainees” and such have their basis in what are actually truly horriffic psychological torture techniques with genesis in criminal programs like MK-ULTRA.
The point? Well, aside from “you mustrun out right now and get the damn book already”, you should also take the time to read this typically excellent interview with McCoy on Democracy Now!
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01.25.06
Posted in News of the World, Torture, Covert Action, Politics at 8:27 pm by Spencer
Read the official full text of the Jan. 22, 2006 preliminary report by Council of Europe investigator Dick Marty, Alleged secret detentions in Council of Europe member states, which is also archived at Cryptome.
The “information memorandum” is part of an ongoing investigation that US-based Human Rights Watch is publicly calling on member European nations to cooperate with. (A worthwhile visit is HRW’s index of their recent work viz. Torture and Abuse.)
The report was released simultaneously with this article in New Statesman magazine (also covered in the Guardian (UK) newspaper) revealing a leaked British government memo formulating what the Guardian calls a “hidden strategy aimed at suppressing a debate about rendition” intended to “stifle attempts by MPs to find out what it knows about CIA ‘torture flights’” even as the Foreign Ministry “privately admits that people captured by British forces could have been sent illegally to interrogation centres.” The memo was written in response to a request from Prime Minister Blair’s office on advice on how to deal with the scandal and, in particular, mounting evidence that the British government was a knowing participant in the secret US program of “extraordinary rendition.” (Hanah Arendt on the role of euphemism in fascism, anyone?)
‘Course, those of us who remember the ’80s — and were paying any attention at all at the time — remember another euphemism: disappearances. I’m just sayin’.
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