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Tuesday, April 16, 2013
Panel Confirms US “Indisputably” Engaged in Torture Post-9/11
Report: Never before had there been such discussions “directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torture on detainees in our custody.”
Common Dreams
April 17, 2013
An independent examination of the United States’ post-9/11 rendition program released Tuesday concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture.” Though not groundbreaking news, the findings—which were reached by a “cautious, institutionalist” panel—demonstrate new and widespread awareness of our nation’s past and perpetual crimes against civilians.
Published by the Constitution Project, the 580-page report (pdf) found that “in the course of the nation’s many previous conflicts” never before had there been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”
Furthermore, the report argues that the use of torture has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.”
Following the news of the report, many reacted by connecting the findings with Monday’s tragic bombing at the Boston Marathon, which many are calling an act of terrorism.
The Board of Directors of the ‘bipartisan’ group behind the report, The Constitution Project, included such infamous notables as former Republican Congressman and director of the NRA’s National School Shield Task Force, Asa Hutchinson; David A. Keene, current President of the NRA and long-time chair of The American Conservative Union; and William Sessions, former director of the FBI under Presidents Reagan and Bush.
Though the report is “not without flaws” and “represents a cautious, bipartisan, institutionalist view,” investigative blogger Marcy Wheeler writes that, because it is so is why its conclusions are so valuable.
Dissecting the report, Wheeler pulls out the following:
Finding #1 U.S. forces, in many instances, used interrogation techniques on detainees that constitute torture. American personnel conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment. Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaties. Such conduct was directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation.
Finding #2
The nation’s most senior officials, through some of their actions and failures to act in the months and years immediately following the September 11 attacks, bear ultimate responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of illegal and improper interrogation techniques used by some U.S. personnel on detainees in several theaters. Responsibility also falls on other government officials and certain military leaders.
Finding #3
There is no firm or persuasive evidence that the widespread use of harsh interrogation techniques by U.S. forces produced significant information of value. There is substantial evidence that much of the information adduced from the use of such techniques was not useful or reliable.
Finding #16
For detainee hunger strikers, DOD operating procedures called for practices and actions by medical professionals that were contrary to established medical and professional ethical standards, including improper coercive involuntary feedings early in the course of hunger strikes that, when resisted, were accomplished by physically forced nasogastric tube feedings of detainees who were completely restrained.
Finding #19
The high level of secrecy surrounding the rendition and torture of detainees since September 11 cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security.
Finding #21
The Convention Against Torture requires each state party to “[c]riminalize all acts of torture, attempts to commit torture, or complicity or participation in torture,” and “proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.” The United States cannot be said to have complied with this requirement.
The panel also found that the US rendition program “enjoyed widespread international co-operation,” writes the Guardian, among countries including the UK, Canada, Italy, Germany, Sweden, Egypt, Syria, Morocco and Jordan.
The Constitution Project study was initiated after President Obama declared in 2009 that he preferred to “look forward, not backward,” declining to to support a national investigation into the post-9/11 counterterrorism programs.
And while the findings namely cover the Bush years, the study is critical of the Obama administration’s policies of “excessive secrecy.”
As the New York Times reports, the study states that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.
Intellihub.com
Panel Confirms US “Indisputably” Engaged in Torture Post-9/11
Friday, February 22, 2013
Inside the Bush Administration"s Lawless Global Torture Regime (And How Obama Remains Complicit)
You may not have heard of Mohammed al-Asad, but the torture he suffered was carried out in your name. And his story is one of 136 such ordeals that were perpetrated by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Those stories are told in a comprehensive report issued by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) this month. Titled “Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition,” the report is the fullest accounting yet of the Bush administration’s global torture ring. The document aims to fully fill in the gaps of what people know about the Bush administration’s torture program, which enlisted the help of 54 countries around the world.
Al-Asad is a Yemeni national who was detained in Tanzania in 2003 by security forces in that country. He was then shipped off to Djibouti where he was held incommunicado before being transferred to a U.S. “rendition team” which consisted of five people, all of whom wore black with their faces covered.
Then al-Asad was shipped off to a third country, Afghanistan, where he was held in isolation, subject to loud music, faced harsh light 24 hours a day and had his diet manipulated. Finally, al-Asad, by this time damaged by intense CIA-led torture, was handed off to Yemen, his home country and a repressive ally of the U.S., where he was imprisoned for using forged travel documents. He was finally released in 2006, without ever being charged with terrorism–the ostensible reason the CIA picked up him up and tortured him in the first place.
Mohammed al-Asad’s ordeal was by no means unique. He was caught up in the dragnet of the CIA’s global program of “extraordinary rendition,” which liberally used torture on alleged terrorist suspects, though some were undoubtedly innocent. In total, 136 people were subject to either the CIA’s “black sites” or “extraordinary rendition” operations.
Authored by Amrit Singh, senior legal officer for national security and counterterrorism at the Open Society Foundations, the report fully exposes the shocking breadth of the CIA’s lawlessness in the age of the war on terror.
“There was a need for a comprehensive public record on the scale and scope of the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations, both in terms of the victims of these operations and the associated human rights abuses, as well as the governments that were complicit,” Singh told AlterNet.
The OSF publication gives names to the people tortured by the CIA, exposes the governments around the globe complicit in America’s torture ring, calls for investigations and accountability for the lawless programs, and makes clear that “extraordinary renditions” were not outlawed by the Obama administration and that the U.S. has a responsibility under the law to investigate and prosecute those behind the global torture program right now. It is at once a call for action directed at the Obama administration and an important historical document that lays bare the utter depravity of the Bush administration’s practices.
The Obama administration’s mantra on the torture carried out under the Bush administration has been to “look forward,” and not backward. This has resulted in grotesque abuses carried out by the CIA being swept under the rug, with no criminal prosecutions forthcoming. And while Obama did sign a much-heralded executive order to ban torture, the order also was “specifically crafted to preserve the CIA’s authority to detain terrorist suspects for short periods prior to ‘rendering’ them to another country for interrogation or trial,” writes Singh.
“Globalizing Torture” focuses on two different yet interlocking aspects of the CIA’s global torture program, which the Bush administration put into overdrive following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
“Extraordinary rendition” is defined as the “transfer—without legal process—of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for purposes of detention and interrogation,” as the report states. The “black sites” were “a secret detention program under which suspected terrorists were held in CIA prisons,” and “where they were subjected to interrogation methods that involved torture and other abuses.”
Singh explains how these are related, writing:
The two programs had similar modalities and entailed the same kinds of human rights violations—the abduction and disappearance of detainees, their extra-legal transfer on secret flights to undisclosed locations around the world, followed by their incommunicado detention, interrogation, torture, and abuse. Moreover, extraordinary rendition typically involved secret detention by the United States if only for the time it took to transfer the person to the custody of another government. In some instances, the same detainee was subjected both to prolonged secret detention in CIA custody and extraordinary rendition to a country where the detainee was at real risk of torture.
The CIA program of extraordinary rendition has its roots in the Clinton administration, as the OSF report notes. Egypt, a strong U.S. ally at the time known to use torture, was one country the CIA often worked with. But it was the Bush administration, following 9/11, that made the program a crucial aspect of how the global war on terror was fought. President Bush “issued a directive authorizing the CIA to conduct these ‘extraordinary renditions without any advance approval from either the White House or the Departments of Justice or State. The CIA gained broad authority to secretly transfer terrorist suspects to be detained and interrogated in the custody of foreign governments, including those known to employ torture.”
While the U.S. government claimed that the countries they sent suspects to had assured them torture wouldn’t be used, those assurances were largely bunk. By 2005, the U.S. had “extraordinarily rendered” over 100 and perhaps as many as 150 people.
What did this program of holding people in top-secret CIA prisons, or sending them off to other countries entail? Brutal torture in order to obtain intelligence about terrorist networks and plots–despite the fact that many interrogation experts say that torture usually produces bad information. But no matter: the CIA implemented a number of tactics that can only be called torture on suspected militants, though some were innocent of any crime. The tactics included “walling,” or repeatedly thrusting a detainee’s head into a “false wall”; stress positions; forced nudity; sleep deprivation; dietary manipulation; and waterboarding. A series of memos from the Bush administration’s Office of Legal Counsel purported to legalize these tactics.
But as the report makes clear, none of the “enhanced interrogation techniques” (in Bush administration parlance) were legal. In fact, international law prohibits torture no matter what, even in the face of a national security emergency. The U.S. is a party to the UN Convention Against Torture, and in the U.S. there is a “federal criminal statute that provides criminal penalties for acts of torture—including attempts and conspiracy to commit such acts—committed outside the United States.” The U.S. is also a party to other international treaties that ban torture, like the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. But the Bush administration systematically violated both domestic and international law by engaging in a global torture program.
The report also makes plain that it was not only the Bush administration that violated international law. Fifty-four governments around the globe that participated in the torture ring also violated international law by being parties to the program. It’s unsurprising that stalwart allies of the U.S., like the authoritarian governments of Jordan, Egypt, Morocco and Pakistan, would willingly allow people to be tortured at the behest of the CIA. These governments have long battled Islamist political movements, and their participation was seen as a way to gather intelligence and crack down on extremists living in their midst. Afghanistan is also an unsurprising destination for those rendered, considering that the U.S. already had control of detainees there as a result of the invasion and occupation of the country in 2001.
But there are also surprises. Countries held up as paragons of social democracy were deeply complicit. Iceland allowed the CIA to use its airspace and airports to transport prisoners to be tortured. Sweden “apprehended individuals and transferred them to CIA custody for extraordinary rendition.” And then there’s also unstable countries like Somalia. The OSF report states that “Somalia provided territory and guards for individuals subjected to secret CIA detention. From about 2002 onward, U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Somalia required the cooperation of faction leaders and former military or police officers.The CIA hired Somali warlords to kidnap suspected militants, creating what the International Crisis Group termed ‘a small industry in abductions.’”
Notably, as Greg Grandin writes in TomDispatch, no Latin American country participated in the program.
The global torture regime put in place by the CIA implicates dozens of governments, and that in itself is staggering. But as David Cole notes in theNation, those governments’ complicity may open a route to accountability.
“The United States may be able to suppress complaints at home, but it lacks the power to exercise such censorship abroad. The only fitting response to the globalization of torture is the globalization of accountability,” writes Cole.
One model of accountability, as Cole notes, has already been established. Last year, the European Court of Human Rights ruled that “Macedonia had violated the European Convention on Human Rights’ prohibitions on torture, inhuman treatment and arbitrary detention by handing Khaled El-Masri to the CIA, which rendered him to Afghanistan and tortured him,” according to Cole. “The court held that transferring El-Masri to the CIA under such circumstances amounted to complicity in torture and ordered Macedonia to pay damages. The European Court has no jurisdiction over the United States, and therefore could not issue a remedy against it; but it did find expressly that the CIA tortured El-Masri, a predicate to its finding of Macedonia’s complicity.”
More recently, Italy’s former intelligence chief was given 10 years in prison for his role in the kidnapping of an Egyptian cleric who was then taken to an American air base and shipped off to Egypt, where he was tortured.
Those European cases make plain why the OSF report remains relevant and vitally important. More investigations and prosecutions of high-level officials in the nations that participated in the CIA’s torture program could still come in the years ahead. The black mark of the CIA’s practices will continue to hang over the world as long as accountability is lacking.
And there are other reasons why the OSF report remains relevant. One glaring one is that the Obama administration is obligated under the law to investigate and prosecute officials who crafted the illegal torture program. And U.S. courts have acquiesced to the Obama administration’s attempts to shield officials who were responsible for “extraordinarily rendering” people off to be tortured. Another glaring reason is that the Obama administration has not banned “extraordinary rendition” or CIA “black sites,” as the OSF report makes clear. Furthermore, reports of secret detention with the involvement of the CIA have continued to surface during the Obama administration, making clear that the excesses of the Bush era have yet to be fully excised.
Asked by AlterNet whether “extraordinary rendition” remains in use in the Obama era, Singh replied: “It’s a little bit hard to know what the current government’s policies are because they still remain secret…The full extent of what is actually continuing has not been acknowledged by the Obama administration. So these [news reports of CIA involvement in secret detentions] raise serious questions about what the Obama administration’s policies are.”
And as ProPublica revealed this month, 20 prisoners who were held by the CIA remain missing. Nobody knows what happened to them or where they are.
Perhaps the report’s most important section is its recommendations, which provide a path forward to correcting the lawless global torture regime. The OSF publication calls on the U.S. to fully repudiate “extraordinary rendition”; disclose information related to human rights violations; conduct criminal investigations into the CIA’s torture; create a board to provide compensation for the victims of the program; and institute safeguards to ensure that counterterrorism operations by the U.S. don’t run afoul of the law.
“The human rights violations associated with CIA secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations were significant and systemic,” writes Singh in the conclusion of her report. “The time has come for the United States and its partner governments to admit to the truth of their involvement in secret detention and extraordinary rendition, repudiate these practices, and conduct effective investigations directed at holding officials accountable.”
Thu, 02/21/2013 – 09:38
Inside the Bush Administration"s Lawless Global Torture Regime (And How Obama Remains Complicit)
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Monday, February 18, 2013
Obama Released Bush"s Torture Memos. Why Not Release the Targeted-Killing Memos?
The Obama administration announced Wednesday night it will disclose classified Department of Justice documents explaining the legal justification for the killing of American terror suspects abroad to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. The decision came in advance of hearings scheduled for Thursday in which the Senate intelligence committee was set to consider the nomination of John Brennan, the White House counterterrorism adviser, to head the Central Intelligence Agency. A bipartisan group of senators and representatives led by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) had spent months pressuring the administration to disclose the contents of the memos before the hearings. But while certain members of Congress will get to see the memos, the documents will not be made public.
Until Wednesday, the members of Congress charged with overseeing United States intelligence community had never actually seen the legal justification for lethal operations that have been taking place over the course of the last four years. Although members of Congress have occasionally made moves toward forcing the administration to disclose that legal rationale, they have always backed down.
Now civil liberties groups want to know why it’s only a few members of Congress, and not the public, who are allowed to see the documents governing how and when Americans can be killed by their own government.
“The United States is not a nation of secret laws, and a memo authorizing the killing of American citizens is too important to keep from the American people,” the American Civil Liberties Union’s Christopher Anders said in a press release Wednesday evening. “Everyone—not just select members of Congress—has a right to know when the government believes it can kill American citizens.”
This isn’t the first time the Obama administration has faced calls for disclosure of controversial Justice Department legal opinions laying out an expansive view of presidential power. Early in his presidency, Obama made the decision to disclose the George W. Bush administration’s internal legal opinions justifying the use of torture against terror suspects. The right howled that Obama was compromising national security, but the president defended his decision in an April 2009 speech to the CIA at the agency’s headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Then, as now, the administration was being sued by civil liberties groups to force disclosure of the documents. Here is an excerpt from that speech:
As I made clear, in releasing the [Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel] memos as a consequence of a court case that was pending and to which it was very difficult for us to mount an effective legal defense. I acted primarily because of the exceptional circumstances that surrounded these memos, particularly the fact that so much of the information was public—had been publicly acknowledged. The covert nature of the information had been compromised…What makes the United States special, and what makes you special, is precisely the fact that we are willing to uphold our values and ideals even when it’s hard—not just when it’s easy; even when we are afraid and under threat—not just when it’s expedient to do so. That’s what makes us different.
The Obama administration, which was losing court fights over the torture memos, has so far succeeded in preventing the courts from compelling the release of the targeted-killing memos. But everything else Obama said about the torture memos—that there are exceptional circumstances (in this case, the deaths of American terror suspects), for example, or that the program is essentially public knowledge—also applies to his targeted-killing memos.
The key difference between the torture memos and the targeted-killing memos is that the torture memos were written during the Bush administration, while the targeted-killing memos were written during Obama’s. Another difference is that because Obama banned torture by executive order, it was highly unlikely that Americans would be affected by the practices the torture memos justified. The same cannot be said for the targeted-killing memos, which are still in force and apply to an ongoing government program.
If releasing the torture memos to the public was justified, it’s very hard to understand why Americans should be kept in the dark about the details of when, how and why their own government can mark them for death. As Wyden said on MSNBC Thursday morning, “Every American has the right to know when their government believes it’s allowed to kill them. I don’t think that, as one person said, is too much to ask.”
Obama Released Bush"s Torture Memos. Why Not Release the Targeted-Killing Memos?