Category: Crimes Against Humanity
Well, It’s Nice That Someone at the CIA Can Tell the Truth
The CIA’s former executive director (#3 in the chain of command), Buzzy Krongard, has admitted that the CIA tortured detainees:
The CIA tortured terror suspects in its programme of “enhanced interrogation”, the agency’s former executive director, Buzzy Krongard, has admitted to the BBC’s Panorama programme.
The agency’s position has always been that the “enhanced interrogation” techniques it used under George W Bush, did not amount to torture, because they were legally approved by the White House at the time.
………
I asked Buzzy Krongard, the CIA’s former executive director, if he thought waterboarding and painful stress positions were torture:
“Well, let’s put it this way, it is meant to make him as uncomfortable as possible. So I assume for, without getting into semantics, that’s torture. I’m comfortable with saying that,” he explained.
………
A report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released last December highlights a number of unauthorised interrogation techniques that were also used on detainees in the CIA’s secret prisons, including excessive beatings, and ice water dousing and baths.
In a public rebuttal to the Senate committee’s report, the CIA has admitted to significant lapses in the monitoring and development of its initial interrogation activities, including instances of using unauthorized techniques.
I would not expect this level of honesty from a former CIA man, even one who only spent most of his career outside of the agency.
It does kind of f%$# the CIA rebuttal, though.
The Turks Insist That There Was No Armenian Genocide
I wonder how they explain a Turkish official taunting starving Armenian children with a piece of bread in 1915.
I do not understand why Turkey continues insist that there was no Armenian Genocide, or why some Turks maintain insist that there was a genocide of Turks by the Armenians, but the only thing that they get from this behavior is a loss of credibility.
It’s enough to make every decent human being quote Joseph Welch.*
*Joseph Welch is best known for an exchange with Senator Joseph McCarthy in which he said, “You’ve done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?”
The Product of a Mentality of Lawlessness and Impunity
Are we the baddies?
I do understand that, historically at least, the primary purpose of a military pistol is for officers to shoot deserters.
These days, in addition to marking a bag of rank, they do have uses for people like rear echelon troops and tankers.
They will never be a major force on the battlefield, but the fact that the blithe way in which the US Army is considering introducing Dumdum bullets in its new pistol:
The Army is considering the use of expanding and fragmenting ammunition, such as hollow point bullets, to increase its next-generation handgun’s ability to stop an enemy.
This bit of news was revealed Tuesday, during the service’s fourth industry day for its Modular Handgun System.
After a recent legal review within the Pentagon, the Army can consider adopting “special purpose ammunition,” said Richard Jackson, special assistant to the Army Judge Advocate General for Law of War, according to an Army news release. This marks a departure from battlefield practices over a century old.
Jackson told Army Times that while this isn’t the first approved use of such bullets in the military, the stance represented “a significant re-interpretation of the legal standard” for ammunition. He also said a lot has changed since the initial movements against the round, especially with the increased prevalence of asymmetric warfare.
“There’s a myth that [expanding/fragmenting bullets] are prohibited in international armed conflict, but that doesn’t make any sense now,” Jackson said.
………
On the battlefield, the U.S. has generally observed the 1899 Hague Convention rule barring expanding and fragmenting rounds, despite the fact that it never has been signatory to that particular agreement, Russell said.
The U.S. reserved the right to use different ammunition where it saw a need. For example, Criminal Investigations Command and military police use hollow points — as do law enforcement agencies around the country — in part to minimize collateral damage of bullets passing through the target. Special Forces also uses expanding/fragmenting rounds in counter-terrorism missions.
“The use of this ammunition supports the international law principles of preventing excessive collateral effects and safeguarding civilian lives,” an Army statement said.
So, not only are they choosing to ignore a bit of international which has been observed by basically everyone since the early 1900s, but they are declaring that a direct violation of the convention is actually just fine, because. ……… Well, just because.
The US state security apparatus y did the same thing with the Geneva conventions on the treatment of prisoners of war, despite the fact that the Third Geneva Convention specifically requires that signatories apply the standards to non-signatories.
Even if one dismisses the humanitarian considerations, the fact that this sort of breakdown in professional ethics frequently presages the end stage of a declining empire.
Obama Just Whitewashed Malaysian Slave Trafficking
The Obama administration has just upgraded Maylaysia’s human trafficking tier, despite the absence of any evidence of improvement:
The United States is upgrading Malaysia from the lowest tier on its list of worst human trafficking centres, US sources said on Wednesday, a move that could smooth the way for an ambitious US-led free-trade deal with the south-east Asian nation and 11 other countries.
The upgrade to so-called “tier two watch list” status removes a potential barrier to President Barack Obama’s signature global trade deal.
A provision in a related trade bill passed by Congress last month barred from fast-tracked trade deals Malaysia and other countries that earn the worst US human trafficking ranking in the eyes of the US State Department.
The upgrade follows international scrutiny and outcry over Malaysian efforts to combat human trafficking after the discovery this year of scores of graves in people-smuggling camps near its northern border with Thailand.
The State Department last year downgraded Malaysia in its annual “Trafficking in Persons” report to tier three, alongside North Korea, Syria and Zimbabwe, citing “limited efforts to improve its flawed victim protection regime” and other problems.
But a congressional source with knowledge of the decision told Reuters the administration had approved the upgraded status. A second source familiar with the matter confirmed the decision.
Some US lawmakers and human-rights advocates had expected Malaysia to remain on tier three this year given its slow pace of convictions in human-trafficking cases and pervasive trafficking in industries such as electronics and palm oil.
………
In its report last year, the State Department said Malaysia had reported 89 human-trafficking investigations in the 12 months to March 2014, down from 190 the previous year, and nine convictions compared to 21 the previous year.
In the latest year to March, Malaysia’s conviction rate is believed to have fallen further, according to human-rights advocates, despite a rise in the number of investigations. That reinforced speculation Malaysia would remain on tier three.
“I would be stunned if they are upgraded. They have done very little to improve the protection from abuse that migrant workers face,” said Phil Robertson, deputy director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia division.
This decision has the effect of condoning slavery in Malaysia, and throughout the world.
Of course, this does not matter to Barack Obama, because is looking at the TPP in the Pacific, the TTIP with Europe, and TiSA* world wide.
*The TiSA is arguably far worse than the other two deals, and has as one of its goals to make financial, insurance, and investment regulation next to impossible.
What Wonkette Said
Let’s Dig Up The Rotting Bones Of Confederate Traitor (And KKK Founder) Nathan Bedford Forrest!
Confederate Major General Nathan Bedford Forrest, by most accounts except the white supremacist ones, was quite the murderous, racist shithead. He was a wealthy slave trader, and he presided over one of the bloodiest massacres of the Civil War at Fort Pillow, where hundreds of black and white Union soldiers, and also black civilians, were murdered in cold blood after they had surrendered. The historian Richard Fuchs wrote that “The affair at Fort Pillow was simply an orgy of death, a mass lynching to satisfy the basest of conduct — intentional murder — for the vilest of reasons — racism and personal enmity.” Oh, and he was also the first Grand Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, so HE SEEMS NICE.
And in Memphis, the city which adopted Forrest so long ago as its own, there’s a big-ass statue of him in Health Sciences Park, in a racially diverse neighborhood that includes a world class medical center, dire poverty, gentrifying liberals, Victorian mansions, yummy restaurants, and the occasional murder problem. Buried underneath that statue are the rotting bigot bones of Forrest and his wife. And there’s a push to move the statue and dig up the bones, but, though that push is PART of the aftermath of the Charleston murders which left nine dead and millions of Confederate flags tossed aside in shame, this fight’s been going on a lot longer.
If there was a Confederate who deserved to end his days at the end of a rope with his remains fed to the dogs, it was Forrest.
Take down that f%$#ing statue, and put his remains in the town dump.
Are We the Baddies?
Mitchell and Webb, Are We the Baddies?
We now have some more details on our torture program, this time from a cooperating witness Majid Khan, and it is even worse than has previously been revealed:
The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency used a wider array of sexual abuse and other forms of torture than was disclosed in a Senate report last year, according to a Guantanamo Bay detainee turned government cooperating witness.
Majid Khan said interrogators poured ice water on his genitals, twice videotaped him naked and repeatedly touched his “private parts” – none of which was described in the Senate report. Interrogators, some of whom smelled of alcohol, also threatened to beat him with a hammer, baseball bats, sticks and leather belts, Khan said.
Khan’s is the first publicly released account from a high-value al Qaeda detainee who experienced the “enhanced interrogation techniques” of President George W. Bush’s administration after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.
Khan’s account is contained in 27 pages of interview notes his lawyers compiled over the past seven years. The U.S. government cleared the notes for release last month through a formal review process.
………
The 35-year-old Khan, a Pakistani citizen who attended high school in Maryland, is awaiting sentencing after pleading guilty in 2012 to conspiracy, material support, murder and spying charges. In exchange for serving as a government witness, Khan will be sentenced to up to 19 years in prison, with the term beginning on the date of his guilty plea.
Khan confessed to delivering $50,000 to al Qaeda operatives in Indonesia. That money was later used to carry out the 2003 truck bombing of a Marriott hotel in Jakarta that killed 11 people and wounded at least 80 others. Khan also confessed to plotting with 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to poison water supplies, blow up gas stations and serve as a “sleeper agent” for al Qaeda in the United States.
Khan was captured in Pakistan and held at an unidentified CIA “black site” from 2003 to 2006, according to the Senate report. Khan’s lawyers declined to comment on where he was captured or held, which they said remained classified.
………
n the interviews with his lawyers, Khan described a carnival-like atmosphere of abuse when he arrived at the CIA detention facility.
“I wished they had killed me,” Khan told his lawyers. He said that he experienced excruciating pain when hung naked from poles and that guards repeatedly held his head under ice water.
” ‘Son, we are going to take care of you,’ ” Khan said his interrogators told him. ” ‘We are going to send you to a place you cannot imagine.’ “
Current and former CIA officials declined to comment on Khan’s account.
Khan’s description of his experience matches some of the most disturbing findings of the U.S. Senate report, the product of a five-year review by Democratic staffers of 6.3 million internal CIA documents. CIA officials and many Republicans dismissed the report’s findings as exaggerated.
Years before the report was released, Khan complained to his lawyers that he had been subjected to forced rectal feedings. Senate investigators found internal CIA documents confirming that Khan had received involuntary rectal feeding and rectal hydration. In an incident widely reported in news media after the release of the Senate investigation, CIA cables showed that “Khan’s ‘lunch tray,’ consisting of hummus, pasta with sauce, nuts, and raisins, was ‘pureed’ and rectally infused.”
The CIA maintains that rectal feedings were necessary after Khan went on a hunger strike and pulled out a feeding tube that had been inserted through his nose. Senate investigators said Khan was cooperative and did not remove the feeding tube.
Most medical experts say rectal feeding is of no therapeutic value. His lawyers call it rape.
………
Khan’s account also includes previously undisclosed forms of alleged CIA abuse, according to experts. Khan said his feet and lower legs were placed in tall boot-like metal cuffs that dug into his flesh and immobilized his legs. He said he felt that his legs would break if he fell forward while restrained by the cuffs.
Khan is not one of the three people whom current and former CIA officials say interrogators were authorized to “waterboard,” whereby water is poured over a cloth covering a detainee’s face to create the sensation of drowning. Nor is he the fourth detainee whose waterboarding was documented by Human Rights Watch in 2012.
His descriptions, however, match those of other detainees who have alleged that they were subjected to unauthorized interrogation techniques using water. Human-rights groups say the use of ice water in dousing and forced submersions is torture.
Because Barack Obama has decided to cover up look forward, none of the sadists who did this will face any consequences for their actions.
All this activities that elicited no meaningful intelligence, so the only benefit can be seen to be giving Dick Cheney a hard on.
What’s more you can be sure that some of these monsters will come home and go to work as cops, where they will apply what they have learned to the rest of us.
We are the baddies.
H/t Digby.
Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, the Torture Loving, Incompetent, and Always Wrong Poster Child for CIA Lack of Accountability and Misuse of Secrecy
She appears to be the Forrest Gump of CIA.
She refused to share data with the FBI about the 911 hijackers, she was instrumental in setting up the torture progam and lobbied for its excesses, and she lied repeatedly to Congress:
A top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA was a key architect of the agency’s defense of its detention and “enhanced interrogation” program for suspected terrorists, developing oft-repeated talking points that misrepresented and overstated its effectiveness, according to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report released last week.
The report singles out the female expert as a key apologist for the program, stating that she repeatedly told her superiors and others — including members of Congress — that the “torture” was working and producing useful intelligence, when it was not. She wrote the “template on which future justifications for the CIA program and the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques were based,” it said.
The expert also participated in “enhanced interrogations” of self-professed 9-11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, witnessed the waterboarding of terror suspect Abu Zubaydah and ordered the detention of a suspected terrorist who turned out to be unconnected to al Qaeda, according to the report.
The expert is no stranger to controversy. She was criticized after 9/11 terrorist attacks for countenancing a subordinate’s refusal to share the names of two of the hijackers with the FBI prior to the terror attacks.
But instead of being sanctioned, she was promoted.
The expert was not identified by name in the unclassified 528-page summary of the report, but U.S. officials who spoke with NBC News on condition of anonymity confirmed that her name was redacted at least three dozen times in an effort to avoid publicly identifying her. In fact, much of the four-month battle between Senate Democrats and the CIA about redactions centered on protecting the identity of the woman, an analyst and later “deputy chief” of the unit devoted to catching or killing Osama bin Laden, according to U.S. officials familiar with the negotiations.
NBC News is withholding her name at the request of the CIA, which cited a climate of fear and retaliation in the wake of the release of the committee’s report in asking that her anonymity be protected.
Yeah, well, her identity is already a matter of public record, so f%$# that last bit:
NBC News yesterday called her a “key apologist” for the CIA’s torture program. A follow-up New Yorker article dubbed her “The Unidentified Queen of Torture” and in part “the model for the lead character in ‘Zero Dark Thirty.’” Yet in both articles she was anonymous.
The person described by both NBC and The New Yorker is senior CIA officer Alfreda Frances Bikowsky. Multiple news outlets have reported that as the result of a long string of significant errors and malfeasance, her competence and integrity are doubted — even by some within the agency.
The Intercept is naming Bikowsky over CIA objections because of her key role in misleading Congress about the agency’s use of torture, and her active participation in the torture program (including playing a direct part in the torture of at least one innocent detainee). Moreover, Bikowsky has already been publicly identified by news organizations as the CIA officer responsible for many of these acts.
The executive summary of the torture report released by the Senate last week provides abundant documentation that the CIA repeatedly and deliberately misled Congress about multiple aspects of its interrogation program. Yesterday, NBC News reported that one senior CIA officer in particular was responsible for many of those false claims, describing her as “a top al Qaeda expert who remains in a senior position at the CIA.”
It turns out that it’s not just people like Glenn Greenwald who condemn her, so do a number of her colleagues at the CIA
The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.—a woman who he does not name—appears to have been a source of years’ worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.
Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that “she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done.”
(emphasis mine)
She also has a f%$#ing wiki page, which makes her about as out as Valerie Plame.
Or as John Cook notes, “It should come as no surprise that a secret organization with no accountability promotes incompetents—but the CIA is actively encouraging the careers of the most aggressively error-prone employees it has.”
Note that she also authorized the kidnapping and torture of an innocent man, and tortured the completely bogus story about Al Qaeda cells involving black Muslims in Montana. (No, this is not The Onion, she actually tortured this fairy tale out of KSM, and believed it).
Excessive secrecy and lack of accountability within our state security apparatus is a threat to our security.
After All, Spying on Congress and Lying About is No Big Deal………
Investigators Said to Seek No Penalty for C.I.A. s Computer Search – NYTimes.com:
A panel investigating the Central Intelligence Agency’s search of a computer network used by staff members of the Senate Intelligence Committee who were looking into the C.I.A.’s use of torture will recommend against punishing anyone involved in the episode, according to current and former government officials.
The panel will make that recommendation after the five C.I.A. officials who were singled out by the agency’s inspector general this year for improperly ordering and carrying out the computer searches staunchly defended their actions, saying that they were lawful and in some cases done at the behest of John O. Brennan, the C.I.A. director.
While effectively rejecting the most significant conclusions of the inspector general’s report, the panel, appointed by Mr. Brennan and composed of three C.I.A. officers and two members from outside the agency, is still expected to criticize agency missteps that contributed to the fight with Congress.But its decision not to recommend anyone for disciplinary action is likely to anger members of the Intelligence Committee, who have accused the C.I.A. of trampling on the independence of Congress and interfering with its investigation of agency wrongdoing. The computer searches occurred late last year while the committee was finishing an excoriating report on the agency’s detention and interrogation program.
So, the investigative body created by John O. Brennan has discovered that the CIA, on the orders of John O. Brennan, spied on the committee investigating them, but hey, no harm no foul.
Which means that no one at the CIA, including John O. Brennan, suffers any discipline.
If Barack “The Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.™” Obama actually cared about the constitutional checks and balances, or his promise to run a transparent government, John O. Brennan would be spending more time with his family right now.
I Knew that He Was a Brony!
Jon Stewart looks deeply into Dick Cheney’s soul, and thanks George W. Bush for not dying.
He also reveals that Dick Cheney is a Brony gone to the dark side.
This may have been his best monologue ever.
Guess What? The Senate Report Reveals that Torture Worked?
At least it works if your goal is to force a prisoner to lie about Saddam Hussein’s connections to Al Qaeda to justify our invading Iraq:
………
Such is the case with the “debate” on whether torture “worked” following the release of the Select Committee on Intelligence report on the CIA’s “Detention and Interrogation Program.”
On the one side, we have among others Dianne Feinstein: “The big finding is that torture doesn’t work and shouldn’t be employed by our country” she told PBS. Similarly, a headline in the Hill tells us: “McCain: ‘I know from personal experience’ torture doesn’t work.”
Then, we have six former directors and deputy directors of the CIA claiming the “interrogation program” “saved thousands of lives” by helping to capture al-Qaeda members. On this score, the Intelligence Committee report seems to have the goods, quoting CIA emails. While the former CIA directors claim a string successes based on torture: “KSM [Khalid Sheik Muhammed] then led us to Riduan Isamuddin, aka Hambali, East Asia’s chief al Qaeda ally and the perpetrator of the 2002 Bali bombing in Indonesia — in which more than 200 people perished.” But the report quotes a CIA official’s internal emails: “Frankly, we stumbled onto Hambali.”
But that doesn’t mean Feinstein and McCain are right and that’s the end of story. The truth is that torture did work, but not the way its defenders claim. It worked to produce justifications for policies the establishment wanted, like the Iraq war. This is actually tacitly acknowledged in the report — or one should say, it’s buried in it. Footnote 857 of the report is about Ibn Shaykh al-Libi, who was captured in Afghanistan shortly after the U.S. invasion and was interrogated by the FBI. He told them all he knew, but then the CIA rendered him to the brutal Mubarak regime in Egypt, in effect outsourcing their torture. From the footnote:
“Ibn Shaykh al-Libi reported while in [censored: ‘Egyptian’] custody that Iraq was supporting al-Qa’ida and providing assistance with chemical and biological weapons. Some of this information was cited by Secretary Powell in his speech at the United Nations, and was used as a justification for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Ibn Shaykh al-Libi recanted the claim after he was rendered to CIA custody on February [censored], 2003, claiming that he had been tortured by the [censored, likely ‘Egyptians’], and only told them what he assessed they wanted to hear. For more more details, see Volume III.” Of course, Volume III has not been made public.
So, while CIA head John Brennan now says it’s “unknowable” if torture lead to information that actually saved lives, it’s provable that torture lead to information that helped lead to war and destroyed lives.
………This was somewhat acknowledged in the other Senate report on torture, released by the Armed Services Committee in 2008. It quoted Maj. Paul Burney, who worked as a psychiatrist at Guantanamo Bay prison: “A large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al-Qaeda and Iraq and we were not successful. The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link … there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results.” The GTMO Interrogation Control Element Chief, David Becker told the Armed Services Committee he was urged to use more aggressive techniques, being told at one point “the office of Deputy Secretary of Defense [Paul] Wolfowitz had called to express concerns about the insufficient intelligence production at GTMO.”
So, torture works if you are planning to create false intelligence to justify a phony war which leads to the biggest military and diplomatic disaster in US History.
So it was all about amusing Dick Cheney.
They generate false intel, and Dick gets that war that he wanted so badly.
Quote of the Day
Good Point
It’s funny, I just made this movie about a guy who triumphs over the inhuman conditions in his imprisonment in an authoritarian country, and I don’t think they did half that sh%$ to him.
— Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart is rightly appalled.
He just did a movie about torture, and the elements of the state security apparatus in Iran were more humane, and less brutal, than those of the United States.
Our torture, and the support for it, both tacit and explicit, exhibited by both Barack Obama and George W. Bush, are going to bear bitter fruit for the us for decades.
We Finally Got the Torture Report. It is Actually a Bit Worse than I Expected.
Understand that we are talking about an executive summary (PDF) that spans 525 pages(!), and I have not read it in detail.
But here are the basic points from the report:
- The CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining co-operation from detainees.
- The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
- The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
- The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
- The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
- The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
- The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
- The CIA’s operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other executive branch agencies.
- The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
- The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
- The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
- The CIA’s management and operation of its Detention and Interrogation Program was deeply flawed throughout the program’s duration, particularly so in 2002 and early 2003.
- Two contract psychologists devised the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques and played a central role in the operation, assessments, and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program. By 2005, the CIA had overwhelmingly outsourced operations related to the program.
- CIA detainees were subjected to coercive interrogation techniques that had not been approved by the Department of Justice or had not been authorized by CIA headquarters.
- The CIA did not conduct a comprehensive or accurate accounting of the number of individuals it detained, and held individuals who did not meet the legal standard for detention. The CIA’s claims about the number of detainees held and subjected to its enhanced interrogation techniques were inaccurate.
- The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
- The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious and significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systemic and individual management failures.
- The CIA marginalised and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
- The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program was inherently unsustainable and had effectively ended by 2006 due to unauthorized press disclosures, reduced cooperation from other nations, and legal and oversight concerns.
- The CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program damaged the United States’ standing in the world, and resulted in other significant monetary and non-monetary costs.
First, I curse the people who jade me agree with John McCain, when he said that he suspected that, “The objection of those same officials to the release of this report is really focused on that disclosure: torture’s ineffectiveness.”
It is the nature of secret organizations to misuse the classification process to avoid embarrassment and for bureaucratic and budgetary infighting.
BTW, John “I Opposed Torture, I Pinkie Swear” Brennan is saying that we should the ignore this document, because torture really worked.
He keeps slicing that bullsh%$, and Barack Obama keeps a swallowing it.
Here are some things have been observed by people who have read the report in more detail than I have been able to yet:
- Gratuitous rectal feedings (This is not a typo)
- That Jose Rodriguez, the official who ordered that tapes of the torture be destroyed, also ordered his subordinates not raise legal issues to his superiors. (Why is this guy not in jail? This is clear obstruction of justice)
- Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, while being paid $1800/day, were the most strenuous supporters of torture, accused people not torturing were, “Running a ‘sissified’ interrogation program. (Why are these guys still accredited by the APA?)
- The CIA ignored recommendations that certain agents who went overboard be disciplined, almost certainly because they did not want a disgruntled agent blowing the whistle to Congress or the New York Times.
- Unsurprisingly, the none of the CIA cases for torture held up under scrutiny.
- Threats of violence against detainees, sexual assaults, and lying to the President.
- The management of the program was so f%$#ed up that, “The CIA once used harsh interrogation tactics on two of its own informants.”
Note the Obama had to be dragged kicking and screaming into releasing this report.
For all of his assertions that the President wants to ensure that this will not happen again, the people who did this, people who were rewarded with promotions and prestige, will suffer no consequences.
We will torture again, and we will do this soon, because people in senior positions at the US state security apparatus are in those positions because they either tortured or facilitated torture.
Fire Brennan. He supports torture, and he lied to Congress.
Fire Clapper. He lied to congress.
Pull the security clearances of those involved in the torture program, particularly Jose Rodriguez, for moral turpitude.
Get the contractors out of the intelligence committee. They are a cancer on an already dysfunctional culture.
Your Moment of Eric Arthur Blair
The Obama administration is claiming that US human rights law does not apply to the mercenary rebels that the US is training and arming in Syria:
Buried down in a report about Pentagon plans to train more mercenaries to fight against Syria we find this declaration of intend by the Obama administration to (again) break the law:
The military screening plan came together after the Obama administration determined that the training program for the Syrians would not be subject to what are known as the Leahy laws, which typically govern U.S. security assistance to foreign forces.
Under those laws, a small office at the State Department works with U.S. embassies overseas to ensure that recipients of State or Defense Department security assistance aren’t linked to major human rights abuses.
…
Because the Syrian rebels will not be part of a state-sponsored force, the laws will not apply, U.S. officials said.
Wait a second. The U.S. congress has set aside $500 million to train, equip and pay these fighters. The U.S. military will do the training. And the Obama administration claims that these are not “state-sponsored forces”? Is the U.S. no longer a nation state?
Besides that the Leahy law as codified for the Pentagon in Section 8057 of the 2014 Omnibus bill does not say anything about “state-sponsored forces”:(1) None of the funds made available by this Act may be used for any training, equipment, or other assistance for the members of a unit of a foreign security force if the Secretary of Defense has credible information that the unit has committed a gross violation of human rights.
(2) The Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of State, shall ensure that prior to a decision to provide any training, equipment, or other assistance to a unit of a foreign security force full consideration is given to any credible information available to the Department of State relating to human rights violations by such unit.
There is nothing about “state-sponsored” in the Pentagon relevant portion of the Leahy law. Will these trained be “foreign”? Yes. Will they be “security forces”? Arguably because they will likely bring more insecurity to Syria than security. But they will have weapons, will be organized in units and will fight. That seems to fit the expression “foreign security force”.
………
All the groups the CIA has trained and equipped to fight against Syria have committed major human rights violations. But the Leahy law does not apply to the CIA. Now as the Pentagon takes over the training of such groups the Leahy law becomes relevant. I dare anyone to find a group of Syrian insurgents fighting against the Syrian government that has not indiscriminately shelled civilians and not committed other major human rights abuses. There is none.
The Obama administration wants to avoid the applicability of the Leahy law because applying it would leave the Pentagon without any potential recruits to train as mercenaries against the Syrian government. It decided to break the law by using an interpretation that actually not covered by the laws wording. It has thus decided to break the law.
Barack Obama, who was a critic of the expansive view of the Unitary Executive advanced by the Bush administration, has become one of its biggest fans.
Worst Constitutional law professor ever.
Obama is Hoping to Lose the Senate
Dan Froomkin is claiming that Obama is running out the clock, because he is expecting the Democrats to lose the Senate, and the Republicans will not vote to release the document:
Continued White House foot-dragging on the declassification of a much-anticipated Senate torture report is raising concerns that the administration is holding out until Republicans take over the chamber and kill the report themselves.
Senator Dianne Feinstein’s intelligence committee sent a 480-page executive summary of its extensive report on the CIA’s abuse of detainees to the White House for declassification more than six months ago.
In August, the White House, working closely with the CIA, sent back redactions that Feinstein and other Senate Democrats said rendered the summary unintelligible and unsupported.
Since then, the wrangling has continued behind closed doors, with projected release dates repeatedly falling by the wayside. The Huffington Post reported this week that White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, a close ally of CIA Director John Brennan, is personally leading the negotiations, suggesting keen interest in their progress — or lack thereof — on the part of Brennan and President Obama.
Human-rights lawyer Scott Horton, who interviewed a wide range of intelligence and administration officials for his upcoming book, “Lords of Secrecy: The National Security Elite and America’s Stealth Foreign Policy,” told The Intercept that the White House and the CIA are hoping a Republican Senate will, in their words, “put an end to this nonsense.”
(emphasis mine)
Seriously. This is despicable.
Barack Obama in general, and CIA Director John Brennan have no intention of letting this report see the light of day.
This is why the Senate Intel Committee should declassify the document on their own using Senate Resolution 400, which allows them to release the document with a simple majority vote.
It’s something to consider for the lame duck session. Because if they don’t do this, or read the report in the well of the Senate, or leak it to Glenn Greenwald, there is a whole bunch of stuff that is both evil and stupid will get buried, and we will do it all again the next time.
They Don’t Want the Truth to Come Out, That’s Why
More Escalation, and More Turkish Machinations
Turkey has the 2nd biggest army in NATO, and much of it is stationed a few miles from ISIS, but, much to the disappointment of the Obama administration they are refusing to take any actions at all:
As fighters with the Islamic State bore down Tuesday on the Syrian town of Kobani on the Turkish border, President Obama’s plan to fight the militant group without being drawn deeper into the Syrian civil war was coming under acute strain.
While Turkish troops watched the fighting in Kobani through a chicken-wire fence, Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, said that the town was about to fall and Kurdish fighters warned of an impending blood bath if they were not reinforced — fears the United States shares.
But Mr. Erdogan said Tuesday that Turkey would not get more deeply involved in the conflict with the Islamic State unless the United States agreed to give greater support to rebels trying to unseat the Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad. That has deepened tensions with President Obama, who would like Turkey to take stronger action against the Islamic State and to leave the fight against Mr. Assad out of it.
It gets better.
While refusing to take any action, Istanbul is demanding that the US put boots on the ground (see vid).
It’s pretty clear that Erdogan has been aggressively supporting the rebels in Syria, including some of the most extreme Jihadis. (The so-called moderates could not fight their way out of a wet paper bag)
Turkey is reticent about taking action for a number of reasons:
- They want the Kurds in Iraq and Syria to be neutralized as a military force that might ally with their own Kurds.
- Erdogan is obsessed with replacing the secular regime in Syria with a Sunni one.
- The Turks fear that if they go in on any operations against ISIS, their complicity in its formation will be revealed.
I think that the last point is most of their concern wight now.
It’s why they went ape sh%$ over Biden’s comments regarding the Turkish role in the Syrian civil war.
Before ISIS was ISIS, Turkey and the House of Saud were the biggest backers of al Qaeda linked militants in Syria, and now that their little monster has become a potential threat, they are looking for plausible deniability.
Judge Rules for Gitmo Detainees on Force-Feedings
The Obama administration has used every possible effort to avoid a public hearing on the Guantanamo hunger strikers, but Judge Gladys Kessler is having none of it:
Videos showing force-feedings of a hunger-striking Guantanamo detainee must be publicly aired, a federal judge ordered this afternoon.
Lawyers for Syrian Abu Wa’el Dhiab, who has been held at Guantanamo since 2002 and has been refusing food for the last 18 months, have characterized the footage as “extremely disturbing.” Dhiab is asking the U.S. District Court in Washington D.C. to stop the military’s practice of forcibly removing him from his cell and restraining him for feedings.
The government argues that the 28 tapes at issue are classified, and will likely appeal today’s ruling. Releasing the videos, the Justice Department has said, might give a glimpse of the the prison infrastructure, or let Guantanamo inmates or others learn how to resist “forced cell extractions” or locate equipment that could be used as a weapon. The government also warned that the videos might “inflame Muslim sensitivities overseas.”
But the judge, Gladys Kessler, found that those justifications were “unacceptably vague, speculative,” or “just plain implausible.” So much information about the force-feedings was already public, Kessler wrote, and certainly detainees “are already familiar with the tactics used to extract them from their cells and enterally feed them.” The videos may be altered to protect the identities of prison guards, she said.
“This may well be the most significant court decision on Guantanamo Bay in years,” Alka Pradhan, one of Dhiab’s attorneys, said in a statement. “No longer does the American public have to rely on propaganda and misinformation, but can finally watch the videotapes and judge for themselves.”
The government tried to have an upcoming hearing in Dhiab’s case — set for Monday — largely closed to the public, but Kessler decided yesterday that it would stay open. It’s not clear whether an appeal or the redaction of the videotapes will delay next week’s proceedings. In a statement, the Justice Department said it was considering its options.
They will appeal, of course.
The Obama administration has bought into the whole “State Secrets” mentality that would give Dick Cheney a stiffie.
Still if these tapes do come out, it will be a good thing, because is is long overdue for Americans to know what is being done in their name.
The US State Security Apparatus has Dropped Even the Pretense of Cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee on Their Torture Report
Because they have put a defense attorney who represented some of the CIA torturers in charge of making the CIA’s redactions in the torture report:
The background of a key negotiator in the battle over a Senate report on the CIA’s use of interrogation techniques widely denounced as torture has sparked concerns about the Obama administration’s objectivity in handling the study’s public release.
Robert Litt, the general counsel for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is a former defense lawyer who represented several CIA officials in matters relating to the agency’s detention and interrogation program. Now he’s in a key position to determine what parts of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s 6,300-page report will be made public.
Litt’s involvement doesn’t appear to be an ethics issue, at least by the legal definition. But experts say that while it may be acceptable on paper, his involvement in the review should have been a red flag.
Seeing as how Obama has seriously drunk the CIA’s Koolaid, the only way that the torture report will see the light of day in any meaningful way is if the Senate votes to declassify it on their own, which they are authorized to do by statute.
The New York Times Compares the CIA Torture Coverup to Catch-22
If you recall, the Times was forced to publish its story about NSA spying on Americans when their James Risen, who co-wrote this story announced that he was going to publish on its own.
The “Gray Lady” has a long history of kowtowing to the US state security apparatus, which is why we see an OP/ED by Editorial Page Editor Andrew Rosenthal invoking the seminal Joseph Heller war farce to describe the CIA’s behavior with regard the Senate Inteligence Committee’s torture report:
In Joseph Heller’s anti-war satire, “Catch 22,” the hero, Yossarian, is assigned to a censorship detail. He amuses himself by deleting all the adverbs and adjectives from soldiers’ letters, then all the articles, then everything but the articles, and so on. His job was to delete details that threatened operational security. The result was gibberish.
It seems the Central Intelligence Agency was inspired by Yossarian’s example.
The C.I.A. was given the task of censoring the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report denouncing none other than the C.I.A. for torturing prisoners, lying to its overseers in Congress about the torture, and exaggerating how much valuable information the torture provided (if any). The result was predictable and proof, if anyone still needed it, that having the subject of the report censor that report is a very bad idea.
When the White House approved the C.I.A.’s censorship (the term of art in Washington is “redaction”) and sent the report to the Hill, James Clapper, the Director of National Intelligence, said in his usual sneering way that 85 percent of the report was intact and that half the blackouts were made to footnotes.
The issue, of course, is not merely how much is deleted, but what is deleted. On Monday, McClatchy reported that C.I.A. censors had blacked out the pseudonyms used to protect the identities of agents involved in the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists. That, McClatchy said, rendered parts of the report unintelligible.
“Redactions are supposed to remove names or anything that could compromise sources and methods, not to undermine the source material so that it is impossible to understand,” said Senator Martin Heinrich, the New Mexico Democrat, who is a member of the intelligence committee. “Try reading a novel with 15 percent of the words blacked out.”
………
Asked about the dispute, the White House press secretary Josh Earnest, offered the usual boilerplate about national security reviews. Here’s how Yossarian might have quoted him: “It is BLANK that a BLANK process be carried out that BLANKS sources and BLANK and other BLANK that is BLANK to our BLANK BLANK.”
Let me be clear: this is not one of the unsigned Times editorials, and as such, it is not as official as that would be, but this is the f%$#ing editorial page editor of the f%$#ing New York Times, and as such, is arguably the 3rd most official statement from the paper. (something from publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. coming in at number 2).
As I have said before, Obama, and the rest of his national security troika, fetishize secrecy, and you can expect a good faith declassification from them, so the Senate Intelligence Committee should exercise its statutory authority, and declassify the report on its own.
Barack Obama Just Admitting to Covering Up Crimes Against Humanity, Which is a Crime Against Humanity
Barack Obama has blithely stated that, “We tortured some folks,” but continues to insist that there will not be any sort of accountability for this:
In startlingly blunt phrasing, President Obama on Friday acknowledged the CIA’s use of brutal interrogation tactics in the years after the Sept. 11 attack, even as he defended the agency’s top spy, who is a veteran of the era.
“We tortured some folks,” Obama said to reporters during a news conference Friday. “We did some things that were contrary to our values.”
………
He sought to put the interrogation program in context, recalling Americans’ fear after the Sept. 11 attacks and the “enormous pressure” on law enforcement to prevent more attacks.
“You know, it is important for us not to feel too sanctimonious in retrospect about the tough job that those folks had,” Obama said. “And a lot of those folks were working hard under enormous pressure and are real patriots.”
No, they weren’t patriots, they were “Good Germans”.
He also further makes it clear that not only will there be no prosecution of torturers, there won’t even be a real investigation of who gave the orders.
As Richard Nixon’s head in a jar might attest to, sometimes it’s the cover up that constitutes a crime, and Obama has thrown his lot in with the coverup.
Whoever performed, authorized, or ordered torture, at a very minimum, should be stripped of their security clearances and fired. (I would argue that the same should apply to those who did not report torture through the chain of command)
He was forced to make this statement, since the Senate report on this reveals that the torture was more common and more brutal than was reported to Congress of the public, as well as the fact that it never produced meaningful actionable intelligence.
It is also important to note that many of the people tortured were guilty of nothing, and had just been swept up in a panic driven dragnet and bounty program.
Finally, it should be noted that torture comes home. National guardsman who observe or participate in torture, and then come home to work in civilian law enforcement, are more likely to engage in torture themselves.
Prosecution, and public shaming, are essential to stopping this.