A judge has determined that Aafia Siddiqui is mentally unfit for trial.
Not surprising, considering that she was apprehended by the Pakistani ISI, and, along with three children were handed over to American authorities about 5 years ago, and held with recourse to…anything. (JFGI)
I have no knowledge of what was done to her, but it is unquestionably clear that she was held by Pakistani and/or US authorities over that period, and I’m sure that it was not a tea party.
There will be a an expedited briefing and hearing on November 24, but this still sucks.
Even the milirary admits that they are innocent, and they are still held as prisoners, though we aren’t torturing them at the request of the Chinese any more.
Or more accurately, he would in any system that has the real possibility for justice and honesty, so notes Dan Froomkin, who makes the point that it is now clear that Bush specifically authorized torture in a memo to the CIA.
Here is hoping that Obama goes after Bush and his Evil Minions ™, because healing by allowing the evil to skate, as was done by Gerald Ford with Richard Nixon, only encourages further evil.
The decision to release these detainees into the United States, who were not only innocent of actions against the united states, but were tortured bu US officials at Chinese request is long overdue.
Unfortunetely, it’s still overdue, as the appeals court stayed the request for release until they can review the appeal by the government.
This is disgraceful.
Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld has quit as prosecutor, claiming that, potential exculpatory evidence has not been provided to the defense in the case of a teenager accused of throwing a grenade at US soldiers in Afghanistan.
Good for him, though the fact that he has refused to testify without immunity indicates that this is worse than just ignoring a bit of evidence.
Newly released documents make it clear that members of the Bush administration held specific discussion to specifically authorize torture by the CIA, and Condoleeza Rice has admitted to this in a written statement to the Senate.
I do not believe that we will be able to hold a fair trial in the US, so send them to the Hague, even though the death penalty is off the table there.
The depressing part is that the vote was far closer than it should have been:
The vote, 8,792 to 6,157 in a mail-in balloting concluded Monday, may help to settle a long debate within the profession over the ethics of such work. Psychologists have helped military and C.I.A. interrogators evaluate detainees, plan questioning strategy and judge its psychological costs. The association’s ethics code, while condemning a list of coercive techniques adopted in the Bush administration’s antiterrorism campaign, has allowed some consultation “for national security-related purposes.”
The referendum, first posted on the Internet as a petition in May, prohibits psychologists from working in settings where “persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the U.S. Constitution, where appropriate,” unless they represent a detainee or an independent third party. The association’s bylaws require that it institute the policy at the next annual meeting, in August 2009.
Yep, we now have a report of what is quite literally a pain ray that causes no tissue damage.
How long before this comes home, and this “torture with evidence of torture” device finds it’s way into police interrogation rooms”
This is good news from a legal perspective, but it bothers me, because the circumstances are so Kafkaesque:
A British court ruled on Thursday that the government must disclose evidence to a defendant being held at Guantanamo Bay, a decision that carried with it implicit criticism of U.S. government detention policies.
In its ruling, the High Court said Britain’s Foreign Office must provide Binyam Mohamed, a British resident detained in Pakistan in 2002 and now held at Guantanamo, with information relating to his time in detention.
His lawyers say the material supports his claim to have been “extraordinarily rendered”, tortured and forced into a confession on terrorism charges.
There is nothing wrong with a psychologist participating in a legitimate military interrogation, but what the APA is debating now is whether psychologists should participate in torture.
Water-boarding, sleep deprivation, beatings, stress positions, extremes in temperature, threats to children…These are torture, and any psychologist, or for that matter any medical professional who aided in this, should never be licensed to practice medicine ever again.
Because it is now clear that US intelligence operatives were torturing detainees at the British base of Diego Garcia.
Tony Blair, pack your toothbrush.
Guantanamo records show that Salim Hamdan was subjected to sleep deprivation for 50 days (see also here).
After 72 hours of sleep deprivation, people start to hallucinate. They literally become psychotic and desperate.
It’s a great technique to get false confessions, because you tell them what they want, and they are inclined to give it to you, but to get accurate information, not really, because after a few days, much less 50 days (!), they no longer have a grasp on reality.
There are a few thousand people, both in the active duty military and in government civilian service, who need to spend the rest of their lives in jail over this.
What has been released is only his interview by a Canadian intelligence agent, but the descriptions are profoundly disturbing, and this is very mild, though there are he was, “sleep deprived for weeks” before the Canadian intelligence agent came in and played ‘good cop’.
This for a child soldier who is a victim, not a terrorist, or at least he wasn’t before being tortured.
Harper is, of course, sitting on his hands about all of this.
Well, it turns out that the ICRC specifically warned members of the military and the Bush administration that they were engaging in war crimes:
Red Cross investigators concluded last year in a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency’s interrogation methods for high-level Qaeda prisoners constituted torture and could make the Bush administration officials who approved them guilty of war crimes, according to a new book on counterterrorism efforts since 2001.
The book says that the International Committee of the Red Cross declared in the report, given to the C.I.A. last year, that the methods used on Abu Zubaydah, the first major Qaeda figure the United States captured, were “categorically” torture, which is illegal under both American and international law.
….Citing unnamed “sources familiar with the report,” Ms. Mayer wrote that the Red Cross document “warned that the abuse constituted war crimes, placing the highest officials in the U.S. government in jeopardy of being prosecuted.” Red Cross representatives were not permitted access to the secret prisons where the C.I.A. conducted interrogations, but were permitted to interview Abu Zubaydah and other high-level detainees in late 2006, after they were moved to the military detention center in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.
The book says the C.I.A. shared the report, which Ms. Mayer first described last year in less detail in The New Yorker, with President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
I really hope that there is a prosecutor in The Hague getting his ducks in a row over this case now.
Minstrel Boy has a righteous takedown of America’s torture policy that is, like everything else on the internet, better written than my stuff, titled, They Don’t Even Plagarize From the Best.
Of interest is that he has actually been through SERE anti-torture training, and he has a low opinion of them too:
It was sadistic bullshit run by sick f@cking bullies. It was some real REMF puke sons of bitches getting their jollies off by acting like a bunch of swaggering pieces of shit. It accomplished jack fucking sh@t. It didn’t train anybody in any kind of knowledge except that there were a lot of pissant low rent bastards who wore the same uniforms as us. F@ck SERE.
Highly recommended read.
At his own request, and concludes that it is indeed torture.
No doubt, he followed this by a scotch or 3.
This is lovely. Now we know were Bush and His Evil Minions™ got their torture ideas:
The military trainers who came to Guantánamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”
What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
(emphasis mine)
So, we used the torture that the Chinese did to our soldiers. That is so delightful.
I would also note that this torture was never intended to get useful information. It was intended to extract false propaganda statements, such as the one that the North Vietnamese extracted from John McCain when he was a prisoner of war.
The unclassified portions of decision by the the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia regarding Uighur’s imprisoned at Gitmo has now been released. (Background here)
With some derision for the Bush administration’s arguments, a three-judge panel said the government contended that its accusations against the detainee should be accepted as true because they had been repeated in at least three secret documents.
The court compared that to the absurd declaration of a character in the Lewis Carroll poem “The Hunting of the Snark”: “I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true.”
“This comes perilously close to suggesting that whatever the government says must be treated as true,” said the panel of the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit.
The unanimous panel overturned as invalid a Pentagon determination that the detainee, Huzaifa Parhat, a member of the ethnic Uighur Muslim minority in western China, was properly held as an enemy combatant.
The panel included one of the court’s most conservative members, the chief judge, David B. Sentelle.
……
Pentagon officials have claimed that the Uighurs at Guantánamo were “affiliated” with a Uighur resistance group, the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, and that it, in turn, was “associated” with Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
……
The court said the classified evidence supporting the Pentagon’s claims included assertions that events had “reportedly” occurred and that the connections were “said to” exist, without providing information about the source of such information.
(emphasis mine)
When you lose David Sentelle on basic human rights, you are off the track. When David Sentelle signs of on a ruling that quotes Lewis Carroll, you are not only off track, you are off planet.
In this case, it’s former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Richard Myers, who appears to have actively shut down any investigation into the legality of techniques mandated by Rumsfeld.
Another day, another war criminal who was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush.
He now has cushy gigs on the boards of military contractors.
He should be in jail awaiting trial.
Big surprise…..not.
It turns out that whenever someone who was not one of Dick Cheney’s butt boys suggested that there were limits to executive power, and getting congress to pass legislation supporting at least part of what they wanted.
Note that this is not moral objections we are talking about. This is professional lawyers saying that the courts will bounce this before the ink is dry.