Category: Torture

Of Course DCIA Brennan’s Not Telling the Truth. His Lips are Moving.

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Over at Emptywheel, Marcy Wheeler observes that CIA Director John Brennan’s assurances that CIA officers would not torture people would not have ended any of the prior instances of torture:

………

But it’s funny, too, because Brennan’s assurances about waterboarding would hold true even for the period when CIA was waterboarding detainees. Because CIA officers didn’t do the waterboarding.

As a reminder, at least four detainees were known to be waterboarded under the Gloves Come Off Memorandum of Notification. The first, Ibn Sheikh al-Libi, was waterboarded by Egyptian intelligence, though with Americans present.

The others were waterboarded as part of torture led by Mitchell and Jessen, who were not CIA officers, but instead contractors. CIA officers were definitely involved in that torture (as they were present for our outsourced Egyptian torture). But the torture was technically done by contractors.

Don’t get me wrong: CIA officers did engage in a whole lot of torture directly.

But Brennan’s squirmy language should only emphasize the fact that even when CIA was in the business of waterboarding, CIA officers didn’t do the waterboarding. So Brennan’s guarantees that CIA officers won’t do so in the future are pretty meaningless guarantees.

Not a surprise.  Brennan has been objectively pro-torture for over a decade.

The control of our state security apparatus has been ceded to people who aggressively pursue evil, self-destructive, and ineffective policies and programs.

The down-slope of empire for your perusal.

Well, It’s Nice That Someone at the CIA Can Tell the Truth

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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.

People Who Should Have Been Drowned at Birth

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The Los Angeles Times editorial board, who are calling for the prosecution of Edward Snowden:
They praise the fact that his leaks created some reforms in our state security apparatus, and then they say that he should go to jail, because, (I guess) confidential press sources and whistle blowers are bad people who should be tortured.

It is an incontrovertible fact that if Snowden returns, and if he is tried, he will be placed in solitary confinement for years, even if just while awaiting trial.  One need only look at the case of (innocent) Wen Ho Lee, who was held in solitary for over a year in an attempt to extort a confession.

It has been the universal conclusion of all civil society organization that have chosen to study this issue have declared extended solitary to be torture.

The LA Times which covered the Lee matter extensively knows this, but even knowing this, they are calling for Snowden to be prosecuted for under an archaic law, and tortured in the process, even if he is eventually found not guilty:

Yet there are serious arguments against a pardon. One is that, in a society of laws, someone who engages in civil disobedience in a higher cause should be prepared to accept the consequences. A stronger objection, in our view, is that Snowden didn’t limit his disclosures to information about violations of Americans’ privacy. He divulged other sensitive information about traditional foreign intelligence activities, including a document showing that the NSA had intercepted the communications of then-Russian President Dmitry Medvedev during a Group of 20 summit in London in 2009. A government contractor who discloses details of U.S. spying on another country is not most Americans’ idea of a whistleblower.

A pardon for Snowden now would be premature. But if he were to return to this country to face the charges against him, the fact that he revealed the existence of a program that has now been repudiated by all three branches of government would constitute a strong argument for leniency. Snowden should come home and make that case.

Otis Chandler would be spinning in his brave.

Are We the Baddies?

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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.

I Really Don’t Know What to Make of This

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But if Sy Hersh’s account of the killing of Osama bin Laden is even ¼ true, this is the biggest story that he’s ever broken:*

It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt, really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So America said.

 The most blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as the Times correspondent in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

 This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers, as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the administration’s account were false.

The cliff notes version of this, courtesy of The Stranger, is:

  • Pakistani officials knew about the raid and even helped the US pull it off.
  • There never was a firefight, neither in the yard outside the house nor once the SEALs got inside.
  • The story of the courier whom the reportedly CIA traced, leading them to bin Laden, was a fabrication.
  • The story of the courier dying in the firefight was a cover-up “because he didn’t exist and we couldn’t produce him,” a retired senior intelligence official told Hersh.
  • The way the CIA actually found out where bin Laden was is that a “Pakistani walk-in” who wanted the $25 million reward came in and told the CIA about it.
  • Osama bin Laden was not armed, contrary to reports that he had a machine gun and was killed in a firefight, and he was not killed with just one or two bullets but “obliterated.”
  • “Seals cannot live with the fact that they killed bin Laden totally unopposed, and so there has to be an account of their courage in the face of danger. The guys are going to sit around the bar and say it was an easy day? That’s not going to happen,” that same retired senior intelligence official said.
  • “Despite all the talk” about what the SEALs collected on-site, the retired official said there were “no garbage bags full of computers and storage devices. The guys just stuffed some books and papers they found in his room in their backpacks.”
  • The story about bin Laden’s sea burial may be a fabrication.
  • The retired official told Hersh that bin Laden’s “remains, including his head… were thrown into a body bag and, during the helicopter flight back to Jalalabad, some body parts were tossed out over the Hindu Kush mountains—or so the Seals claimed.”
  • Obama was going to wait until a week after bin Laden’s death to announce it, and he was going to tell the American people that bin Laden had been killed by a drone, but after the SEALs had to blow up their malfunctioning helicopter on-site, attracting attention locally, everything changed.
  • The story about the vaccination program carried out locally in an attempt to get bin Laden’s DNA—a story that “led to the cancellation of other international vaccination programmes that were now seen as cover for American spying”—wasn’t true.
  • Retired official again: “It’s a great hoax.”

(emphasis original)

The American press has been completely dismissive of Hersh’s report, and, it’s fair to say that the sourcing is not as solid as I would have liked.

Then again, when you look at the biggest supporter of the “Zero Dark Thirty” narrative, the CIA, we know that they are still lying about torture, that they still nave not come clean about spying on the Senate Intelligence Committee, and basically wrote the movie “Zero Dark Thirty”.

I know that the movie version is false, at least as to whether torture worked, the Senate Intelligence Committee report proved that.

I’m not sure where the truth lies, and any dealing with the machinations of the “war on terror” in general, and the Pakistani state security apparatus in particular. is a bag full of cats.

At this point, I’ll go with Charlie Pierce’s:

What’s clear is that, in the war on terror, or whatever it is in which we’ve been engaged since we handed the military policy over to the spooks and thrown international crisis diplomacy into the vast, deep underbrush of myth and legend generated by the conjuring spells of the intelligence world, that we willingly surrendered self-government to magic and spellcraft. And Osama bin Laden is still dead, and his body is still at the bottom of the sea. Maybe.

I’m not clear what the truth is, except (of course) for the fact that the CIA tortured, that it did not work, and that Langley lies about everything.

I is confuzzled.

*And yes, I mean that statement. If is just ¼ true, this is the biggest story that Seymour f%$#ing Hersh has ever broken. Think about that for a moment.

Nice Job of Abusing Your Interns

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Jonathan Chait decided to determine how many times that conservative legacy admission William Kristol invoked Hitler, Churchill, Chamberlain and Munich:

Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, writing in opposition to the Iran deal recently, observed, “One is reminded — as one so often is these days — of Churchill’s great speech in Commons after Munich … ” It is true that Kristol is often reminded of Churchill and Munich these days. This may not tell us anything about the current situation with Iran, however, since Kristol is reminded of Churchill and Munich on a great many days. It is a historic reference he has used to explain a great many episodes.

I recently asked New York interns Claire Landsbaum and Claire Voon to compile a list of Kristol’s public references to the Munich agreement and its main players. This research ordeal, presented in reverse chronological order, represents the sort of character-building exercise, I am sure Kristol would agree, that today’s youth badly need.

I’m sorry, I think that you are torturing Claire Landsbaum and Claire Voon.

Forcing them to read everything that Bill Kristol has written back to at least 1997 constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Quote of the Day

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Lee Hamilton (former Congressman and former 911 commission co-chairman) calls for a complete end of torture, driven by improved Congressional oversight.

He believes that the reputational and social damage is such that it cannot be justified.

Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism, while lauding Hamilton’s call for and end to torture, notes that the fact that the former congressman is suggesting weak tea when specifically eschews prosecutions:

Kudos, but who would be stupid enough to believe us if we said we had? There is only one way to do that, and that’s to put the torturers on trial, and convict them.

He’s right.

Until we prosecute the worst of the torturers, and pull the security clearances of the rest, the senior staff of our state security apparatus will be populated by those torturers, any promise of better behavior is simply not credible.

Quote of the Day

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If we render our torturers superior to the political institutions of the government, and if we render the police superior to the civil power of elected officials, then we essentially have empowered independent standing armies to conduct our wars and enforce our laws, and self-government descends into bloody farce.

—Charlie Pierce

He is taking about how our torturers and our police demand to operate with impunity.

Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, the Torture Loving, Incompetent, and Always Wrong Poster Child for CIA Lack of Accountability and Misuse of Secrecy

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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………

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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.

Guess What? The Senate Report Reveals that Torture Worked?

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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

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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.

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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:

  1. The CIA’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining co-operation from detainees.
  2. The CIA’s justification for the use of its enhanced interrogation techniques rested on inaccurate claims of their effectiveness.
  3. The interrogations of CIA detainees were brutal and far worse than the CIA represented to policymakers and others.
  4. The conditions of confinement for CIA detainees were harsher than the CIA had represented to policymakers and others.
  5. The CIA repeatedly provided inaccurate information to the Department of Justice, impeding a proper legal analysis of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
  6. The CIA has actively avoided or impeded congressional oversight of the program.
  7. The CIA impeded effective White House oversight and decision-making.
  8. The CIA’s operation and management of the program complicated, and in some cases impeded, the national security missions of other executive branch agencies.
  9. The CIA impeded oversight by the CIA’s Office of Inspector General.
  10. The CIA coordinated the release of classified information to the media, including inaccurate information concerning the effectiveness of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques.
  11. The CIA was unprepared as it began operating its Detention and Interrogation Program more than six months after being granted detention authorities.
  12. 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.
  13. 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.
  14. 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.
  15. 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.
  16. The CIA failed to adequately evaluate the effectiveness of its enhanced interrogation techniques.
  17. The CIA rarely reprimanded or held personnel accountable for serious and significant violations, inappropriate activities, and systemic and individual management failures.
  18. The CIA marginalised and ignored numerous internal critiques, criticisms, and objections concerning the operation and management of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program.
  19. 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.
  20. 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:

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.

“Most Transparent Administration Ever,” my Ass!!!

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So, the administration, via the gentle words of John Kerry, has asked that the unclassified summary of the torture report release be delayed:

Secretary of State John Kerry personally phoned Dianne Feinstein, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Friday morning to ask her to delay the imminent release of her committee’s report on CIA torture and rendition during the George W. Bush administration, according to administration and Congressional officials.

 Kerry was not going rogue — his call came after an interagency process that decided the release of the report early next week, as Feinstein had been planning, could complicate relationships with foreign countries at a sensitive time and posed an unacceptable risk to U.S. personnel and facilities abroad. Kerry told Feinstein he still supports releasing the report, just not right now.

 “What he raised was timing of report release, because a lot is going on in the world — including parts of the world particularly implicated — and wanting to make sure foreign policy implications were being appropriately factored into timing,” an administration official told me. “He had a responsibility to do so because this isn’t just an intel issue — it’s a foreign policy issue.”

Bullsh%$.

If this gets delayed, then Richard Burr (R-NC) is head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and the distinguished gentleman from North Carolina has made it clear that he is opposed to any release of any information regarding torture by the committee.

The Obama administration, which has been thoroughly captured by the most repulsive elements of the US state security apparatus, would be fine with that.

Worst Constitutional Law Professor Ever.™

Well, Here is a Shocker

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When the Department of Justice investigated CIA torture, they never interviewed its victims:

As the US government prepares to defend its record on torture before a United Nations panel, five Libyan men once held without charge by the CIA say the main criminal investigation into allegations of detainee abuse never even interviewed them.

 The Libyans’ accusation reopens controversy over the 2012 pre-election decision by the prosecutor in the case not to bring charges against anyone involved in CIA abuse – an episode the US State Department has held up as an example of its diligence in complying with international torture obligations.

On Wednesday, a United Nations committee in Geneva is scheduled to hear a US delegation outline recent measures Washington has taken to combat torture. It will be the first update the US has provided to the committee since 2006, when the CIA still operated its off-the-books “black site” prisons. Human rights campaigners who have seen the Obama administration repeatedly decline to deliver justice for US torture victims consider it a belated chance at ending what they consider to be impunity.

 ………

That high-profile inquiry, conducted by assistant US attorney John Durham, wrapped in 2012 without bringing criminal charges against anyone involved in the deaths of two detainees in CIA custody. That decision, heralding the end of federal investigations for post-9/11 detainee abuse, was preceded by Durham’s 2011 announcement that he would not proceed past a “preliminary review” for 99 out of 101 cases of suspected CIA torture.

The State Department, in a 2013 written submission to the UN committee, referred to Durham’s team as “experienced professionals” that found the “admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt.”

But the Libyans say that neither Durham nor his staff “ever sought or requested our testimony”.

What a surprise.  Obama and Holder’s “investigation” was a sham.

This is a feature, not a bug, just like his refusal to prosecute financial fraud of Wall Street.

Worst ……… Constitutional ……… Law ……… Professor ……… Ever

Obama is Hoping to Lose the Senate

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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.

Judge Rules for Gitmo Detainees on Force-Feedings

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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.

James Foley was Tortured Before Being Beheaded Because We Tortured

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Dan Froomkin, in a post on the continuing efforts by the US state security apparatus to use redactions on the Senate torture report to conceal the nature torture, gives us this tidbit:

Feinstein also agreed with [NBC reporter Andrea] Mitchell’s suggestion that Islamic militants in Syria tortured Americans — including journalist James Foley, who was reportedly waterboarded before being beheaded — in a “rebuke” to the U.S. for its own use of torture during the Bush administration.

 “The United States military has always prevented any kind of torture or waterboarding because they felt that then, whatever the enemy was, would come back and do it to our people,” she said. “In this case, the enemy came back and did it to one of our citizens.”

So, torture does not work, and it gets our guys tortured.

BTW, it’s clear that the CIA is attempting to change the conclusions of the report through supposedly security related redactions:

Senate intelligence committee chair Dianne Feinstein expects the executive summary of her staff’s long-awaited report on the torture of American detainees to be ready for public release before the end of September, she said in an unaired segment of her “Meet the Press” interview this weekend (starts at 10:25 of the video).

The torture report, which was five years in the making, was sent to the White House for declassification in April. But the exhaustive redactions that Obama administration officials sent back in early August included such things as the elimination of pseudonyms, apparently to make the report too confusing to follow, and the blacking out of copious supporting evidence, such as proof that information derived from torture actually came from other intelligence sources.

“What we are engaged in is working with the administration to see that the redaction is such that it does not destroy the report,” Feinstein told NBC’s Andrea Mitchell. “If you redact the evidence — heavily — then we cannot sustain our findings. We will not put out a report that does not enable us to sustain our findings. And I believe that that is understood.

………

People who have seen the report’s executive summary have told reporters that it discloses abuse that was more brutal, systematic and widespread than generally recognized — and presents extensive evidence that officials most closely linked to the torture regime lied to others inside the CIA and the Justice Department, as well as to Congress and the public, about what they were doing, what they had done, and what it accomplished.

The evidence is quite clear at this point:  The CIA is actively obstructing the oversight process, and as such, it should have no input whatsoever in clearing the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report.

Obama should, but won’t, remove the security review process from the CIA, so the Senate Committee should do release it on it’s own, as its right under statute.

The US State Security Apparatus has Dropped Even the Pretense of Cooperating with the Senate Intelligence Committee on Their Torture Report

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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.