Indictment of Torture

Padilla convicted on terrorism support charges reports MSNBC.

Terrorism support? Weren't we told that he planned to use a dirty bomb in the US, or perhaps blow up apartment buildings by causing natural gas leaks? Why wasn't he charged for those crimes?

Because of the Bush administration's torture policies, that's why. There is no way a court would have let them use the evidence they obtained- much of it from Padilla himself- while denying him, a US citizen, of his civil rights and holding him at a military detention center and treating him horribly.

From the Christian Science Monitor:

At its root, US treatment of Padilla shows the inclination to do anything to break the silence of a suspected terrorist, even it means violating such basic citizen rights as protection against self-incrimination and harsh interrogation, as well as the right to a trial.

In short, the US military used terror – Padilla had little or no human contact for more than three years – to fight terror. Many mental health experts say his severe seclusion in a Navy brig impaired his thinking. A judge confirmed the disability but let the case continue, refusing to probe the government's hand in altering Padilla's ability to defend himself.

This last point is key, because it means that the current conviction may not even withstand judicial scrutiny on appeal. A panel of judges may throw out the conviction, and force a retrial in which Padilla gets to challenge the manner in which he was interrogated and detained (such as the use of sensory deprivation as shown below). As a US citizen, a reversal of the conviction is a real possibility.

And that one way that torture weakens- not enhances- our security. Our security is enhanced by bringing those who would harm us to justice. We cannot do this if we engage in torture, because that will render evidence obtained inadmissable in courts. It undermines the validity of any criminal- civilian or military- process, and it will result, inevitably, in some very bad people eventually being turned loose. Are we going to hold the people at GITMO forever?

Americans must get past their anger at terror suspects. They must seek justice. This can only be done by respecting the rule of law, and the Constitution, and by taking the high road, not resorting to torture, and, as the CS Monitor points out, the very thing we are working against- terror.

U.S. of Torture

Outstanding article exposing the US support of torture beginning almost immediately after 9/11. A must read article from the New Yorker. Read the whole thing, but some selections are below.

On September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a secret Presidential finding authorizing the C.I.A. to create paramilitary teams to hunt, capture, detain, or kill designated terrorists almost anywhere in the world. Yet the C.I.A. had virtually no trained interrogators. A former C.I.A. officer involved in fighting terrorism said that, at first, the agency was crippled by its lack of expertise. “It began right away, in Afghanistan, on the fly,” he recalled. “They invented the program of interrogation with people who had no understanding of Al Qaeda or the Arab world.” The former officer said that the pressure from the White House, in particular from Vice-President Dick Cheney, was intense: “They were pushing us: ‘Get information! Do not let us get hit again!’ ” In the scramble, he said, he searched the C.I.A.’s archives, to see what interrogation techniques had worked in the past. He was particularly impressed with the Phoenix Program, from the Vietnam War. Critics, including military historians, have described it as a program of state-sanctioned torture and murder. A Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 and 1971, ninety-seven per cent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance. But, after September 11th, some C.I.A. officials viewed the program as a useful model.

Lacking in-house specialists on interrogation, the agency hired a group of outside contractors, who implemented a regime of techniques that one well-informed former adviser to the American intelligence community described as “a ‘Clockwork Orange’ kind of approach.” The experts were retired military psychologists, and their backgrounds were in training Special Forces soldiers how to survive torture, should they ever be captured by enemy states. The program, known as SERE—an acronym for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape—was created at the end of the Korean War. It subjected trainees to simulated torture, including waterboarding (simulated drowning), sleep deprivation, isolation, exposure to temperature extremes, enclosure in tiny spaces, bombardment with agonizing sounds, and religious and sexual humiliation. The SERE program was designed strictly for defense against torture regimes, but the C.I.A.’s new team used its expertise to help interrogators inflict abuse. “They were very arrogant, and pro-torture,” a European official knowledgeable about the program said. “They sought to render the detainees vulnerable—to break down all of their senses. It takes a psychologist trained in this to understand these rupturing experiences.”

The use of psychologists was also considered a way for C.I.A. officials to skirt measures such as the Convention Against Torture. The former adviser to the intelligence community said, “Clearly, some senior people felt they needed a theory to justify what they were doing. You can’t just say, ‘We want to do what Egypt’s doing.’ When the lawyers asked what their basis was, they could say, ‘We have Ph.D.s who have these theories.’ ” He said that, inside the C.I.A., where a number of scientists work, there was strong internal opposition to the new techniques. “Behavioral scientists said, ‘Don’t even think about this!’ They thought officers could be prosecuted.”

A secret government document, dated December 10, 2002, detailing “SERE Interrogation Standard Operating Procedure,” outlines the advantages of stripping detainees. “In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.” The document advises interrogators to “tear clothing from detainees by firmly pulling downward against buttoned buttons and seams. Tearing motions shall be downward to prevent pulling the detainee off balance.” The memo also advocates the “Shoulder Slap,” “Stomach Slap,” “Hooding,” “Manhandling,” “Walling,” and a variety of “Stress Positions,” including one called “Worship the Gods.”

No need to read between the lines

The US government, with the support of it's President and Attorney General, engages in torture. Were that not so, it would be easy to clearly indicate that torture was not in the CIA's tool kit. Instead, Gonzalez has to parse his words. From his testimony (source) before Congress...

DURBIN: Mr. Attorney General, the opinion of the judge advocates general was unanimous. They all agreed that the following interrogation techniques violate Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions -- and there are five -- painful stress positions, threatening detainees with dogs, forced nudity, waterboarding and mock execution.Do you agree?

GONZALES: Senator, I'm not going to get in a public discussion here about possible techniques that may be used by the CIA to protect our country.What I can say is the executive order lays out a very careful framework to ensure that those agents working for the CIA trying to get information about the next attack do so in a way that is consistent with our legal obligations.And so, again, without commenting on specific techniques, we understand what the rules of the road are.

DURBIN: Mr. Attorney General, do you know what you are saying to the world about the United States when you refuse to acknowledge that these techniques are beyond the law, beyond the tradition of America?

DURBIN: These judge advocates general have a responsibility as well. They have been explicit and unanimous. The problem with your statement, Mr. Attorney General, is that you are leaving room for the possibility that you disagree with them.

GONZALES: And, of course, those in the military are subject to the Army Field Manual. It's a standard of conduct that is way above Common Article 3. And so they come at it from a different perspective, quite frankly, Senator.And, again, I wish I could talk in more detail about specific actions, but I cannot do that in an open setting.

DURBIN: But let me just ask you to consider this for a moment.Aside from the impact of what you've just said on America's reputation in the world, aside from the fact that we have ample record that you have disagreed with the use of Geneva Convention standards and have pushed the torture issue beyond where the courts and the congress would take it, would it be legal for a foreign government to subject a United States citizen to these so-called enhanced interrogation techniques which I just read?

GONZALES: Would it be legal for the United States government to subject...

DURBIN: No, for a foreign government...

GONZALES: For a foreign government.

DURBIN: ... to subject a United States citizen to the five -- any of the five interrogation techniques which I read to you?

GONZALES: Well, again, Senator, we would take the position if you're talking about an American soldier who fights pursuant to the rules of the Geneva Convention...

DURBIN: No, no, no. That's a different story. That's a uniformed person. I'm talking about a U.S. citizen.

GONZALES: Would it be legal under their laws? Would it be legal under international standards? What do you mean by, "Would it be legal?"We obviously would demand humane treatment and treatment for our U.S. citizens consistent with international legal obligations.

In other words, our government would demand that other governments not do to our citizens what we will not say we are not doing to their citizens.

Did I just type that?? With that kind of double-speak, I could be Attorney General.

Here's a video clip of Gonzalez on the same topic. Hang in there until the end of the clip and you'll see that our government does not prohibit the use of waterboarding or mock executions, to use two examples, and that the Attorney General says it is not 'clear' that such techniques are morally wrong.

Gonzalez Hearings

Bush on Torture

A nice op-ed on the Bush Executive Order regarding torture.

Once upon a time, a U.S. official's condemnation of torture was a statement of moral principle. Today, it is an opportunity for obfuscation. We have learned that when President Bush says, "We don't torture," it's important to read the fine print. So it was once again on July 20, when Bush issued a long-awaited executive order purporting to regulate interrogation tactics used by the CIA in the "war on terror." According to a White House press release, the order provides "clear rules" to implement the Geneva Conventions governing treatment of detainees in wartime -- rules the administration insisted did not even apply to the "war on terror" until the Supreme Court ruled otherwise last summer. But while the new rules reflect a significant retreat by the administration from its initial torture policies, they are anything but "clear," come far too late in the day, and in any event are unenforceable.

But how much of a step the administration has really taken remains a serious question. The actual tactics the CIA is authorized to use remain classified, based on the bogus claim that agency interrogators need to keep detainees guessing about how far they can go in order to interrogate effectively. The Army, by contrast, has set forth for the world to see the specific tactics its interrogators can employ -- in the Army Field Manual. And of course, it is black-letter law that no use or threat of physical force is permissible for state and federal police interrogations. Yet both the Army and domestic police obtain useful information from interrogations every day. The limits do not need to be secret for interrogation to be effective.

While the executive order flatly forbids torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, its failure to specify permissible and impermissible techniques seems designed to leave the CIA wiggle room. A prohibition on "acts of violence," for example, applies only to those violent acts "serious enough to be considered comparable to murder, torture, mutilation, and cruel or inhuman treatment," as defined by the Military Commissions Act. The MCA, in turn, limits "cruel and inhuman treatment" to the infliction of bodily injury that entails: "(i) a substantial risk of death; (ii) extreme physical pain; (iii) a burn or physical disfigurement of a serious nature (other than cuts, abrasions, or bruises); or (iv) significant loss or impairment of the function of a bodily member, organ, or mental faculty." In other words, the president's order appears to permit cutting or bruising a suspect so long as the injury does not risk death, significant functional impairment or "extreme physical pain," an entirely subjective term.

With a different administration and a different history, one might be less inclined to read President Bush's latest executive order so skeptically. But this administration has shown repeatedly that it approaches the prohibitions on coercive interrogation the way a particularly creative tax lawyer might treat the tax code. Instead of striving to uphold what we thought were our country's moral principles, the Bush administration seeks to exploit every loophole it can find or manufacture. As a result, the administration has lost the trust of the nation and of the rest of the world. Executive orders like this one are not likely to win it back.

More on Torture

Rumsfeld lied (shocking!) about what he knew and when he knew it regarding Abu Grhaib. Another great article by Sy Hersh.

Checking the Imperial President

Bush loses another court battle for unfettered authority in the (so-called) "war on terror." Hopefully the victories for the Constitution will continue to pile up.

Court overrules Bush ‘enemy combatant’ policy
Judges: President may not detain legal U.S. resident without charging him

The ruling was a harsh rebuke of one of the central tools the administration believes it has to combat terror.

“To sanction such presidential authority to order the military to seize and indefinitely detain civilians, even if the president calls them ‘enemy combatants,’ would have disastrous consequences for the Constitution — and the country,” the court panel said.

Powell on Gitmo

"[E]very morning I pick up a paper and some authoritarian figure, some person somewhere, is using Guantanamo to hide their own misdeeds. [W]e have shaken the belief that the world had in America's justice system by keeping a place like Guantanamo open ...  We don't need it, and it's causing us far more damage than any good we get for it,"  -Colin Powell  [from Andrew Sullivan]

 

It's unfortunate for Powell and for America the he decided to be such a 'team player' in the build-up to the Iraq invasion.  It is his nature to be the voice of reason for an Administration with too little reason.  If he had stood on principle, many Americans may have been more suspicious of Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld claims and more likely to ask serious questions about the propriety of the war.  Failing to do so helped lead us into war, and destroyed the credibility of someone who I would generally be inclined to trust.  Powell's story, to me, is a sad one, but not overwhelmingly so, because his wounds are self-inflicted.

NY Times on Gitmo

Gitmo: A National Disgrace

 

Congress needs to restore the right of the inmates of Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions. By the administration's own count, only a small minority of the inmates actually deserve a trial. The rest should be sent home or set free.

Second, Congress should repeal the Military Commissions Act and start anew on a just system for determining whether prisoners are unlawful combatants. Among other things, evidence obtained through coercion and torture should be banned.

And Congress should shut down Guantánamo Bay, as called for in bills sponsored by two California Democrats, Representative Jane Harman in the House and Senator Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Both lawmakers are intimately familiar with the camp and have concluded it is beyond salvaging.

The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of "the war against terror." It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place.

Enhanced Interrorgation Techniques=Torture

Andrew Sullivan writes: "Second, of course, the hideous term: "enhanced interrogation techniques.' I'm not sure where exactly this came from..." and gets an answer from a reader:

"enhanced interrogation techniques" is a fairly decent English translation of the Gestapo euphemism "verschaerfte Vernehmung" which was the code word for torture in the Third Reich. Look it up." The dictionary confirms it.

How wonderful that the Bush Admininstration looks to the Nazis for its verbage. What's next? "The Final Solution to the Iraqi Question"?

VP for Torture

In an earlier post the Pilgrim said that a 'fish rots from the head down.'

How's this for a headline supporting that old saying?

Cheney criticizes the Geneva Conventions in Military Academy commencement address

"Capture one of these killers, and he'll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States," the Vice President said in the Saturday morning speech. "Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away."

Wonderful. Rather than live up to the highest moral standards- which is what is truly great about America- let's live down to the standards of the terrorists.

Even worse, he criticizes the Geneva Conventions in front of graduates of the military academy- those whose responsibility should be to uphold those conventions out in the field upon graduation.

When will Cheney and the others who condone torture recognize and admit that their stance is not only morally reprehensible, but actually puts Americans at risk?

Torture's acceptability

The thinking of the Bush Administration may have infected the military quite fully.  In an online poll of the Military Times (of course an online poll is not scientific) nearly 50% of respondents said : "Yes, it [torture] should be used to gather vital information."  Another 19% said it was acceptable to "save US troops' lives".  Only 30%- less than 1/3- said torture was never acceptable.

 

It seems a safe assumption that the vast majority of participants in the online poll would be military readers- the Military Times is hardly a mainstream media source.  It targets members of the military.  As such, it reflects an infection that has been spread from Rumsfeld/Cheney/Bush to the general military population.

 

A fish, the saying goes, rots from the head down.

 

The US needs new leadership, moral leadership, to restore traditional American values and the rule of law on this issue.

A Military Reason NOT to Torture

"When I was in Vietnam, one of the things that sustained us, as we went — underwent torture ourselves — is the knowledge that if we had our positions reversed and we were the captors, we would not impose that kind of treatment on them," - John McCain.

Watch O'Reilly Lose It

O'Reilly attacks a 29 year veteran of the armed services, and someone who taught the Geneva Conventions.

He's completely unable to recognize, and admit, that by failing to follow the Geneva Conventions, we encourage others to do the same- and put Americans and our allies in danger.

When he talks over her, she says, "I served my country 29 years, how many did you serve?"

His reply, "Cut her mic."

Class act.



Andrew Sullivan has his say on this here.

People like O'Reilly would be quick, under different circumstances, to say that the US is a leader in the world. And we are. Are we going to be a leader for good, or for ill? That is the key question.

American Values: RIP

Evidence from alleged al Qaeda operative Jose Padilla can be used against him at trial despite defense claims the American's arrest was based on information obtained through torture, a U.S. judge ruled on Wednesday.

U.S. District Judge Marcia Cooke refused to reconsider a magistrate's ruling in September to admit Padilla's statements to the FBI as evidence in his trial starting on April 16 on charges of conspiring to aid Islamist extremists overseas.

Padilla [was arrested and charged] based in part on information provided by two prisoners held at the U.S. military jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, Abu Zubaydah and Binyam Muhammad...

Muhammad has claimed in court documents that he gave false confessions implicating Padilla while held in a Moroccan prison, where he was beaten and slashed on the chest and penis with scalpels before being sent to Guantanamo.

Zubaydah was transferred to Guantanamo in September, along with 13 other "high-value" captives who had been held in secret CIA prisons. The New York Times has said his interrogators stripped him naked, held him in an ice-cold room and subjected him to deafeningly loud music.

All three of the key individuals in this case claim to have been tortured. Given what we have learned about US treatment of prisoners over the past three years, those claims deserve serious examination. Any information based on torture should not be allowed in any court- civilian or military.

Vice-president Cheney has declared that waterboarding (a 'dunk in the water') is a "no-brainer" and not torture. See the clip below. With this sort of support, why wouldn't interrogators continue to cross the line?




In this more extended piece from MSNBC there is some commetary on Cheney's remarks, and a demonstration of what 'waterboarding' is- and it's not a dunk in the water.



Must we become terrorists to combat terrorists? Must we sell our soul to win against those who have sold theirs to hatred?

Why the British should be worried

US Outsourcing... Torture

Here's the story of one person who's torture is the responsibility of the US President.

UN Chief: Close GITMO

UNITED NATIONS ( Reuters) - New U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon believes the U.S. prison at Cuba's Guantanamo Bay should be shut down, he said on Thursday.

"Like my predecessor, I believe that the prison at Guantanamo should be closed," Ban told a news conference. U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan, who stepped down on December 31, had also called for the facility to be closed.

More than 770 captives have been held there since [the prison was opened 5 years ago], of whom only 10 have been charged with crimes.

 

Many of those 770 have been detained and released.  Some of them have filed lawsuits against the US.  The Pilgrim hopes those suits go forward so that Americans can be made more fully aware of the abuses that have taken place there, and more fully aware of the damage done to the US as a traditional moral leader in the area of human rights.

 

If the perpetrators of torture are arrested, tried, and punished, then some of the leadership of America can perhaps be restored. 

 

And perhaps people will think more carefully before following their leader blindly down the path of immorality.

 

GP

Beginning to restore the Constitution?

This could be a very important start to restoring proper constitutional government in the US, and reclaiming moral leadership in the world.

 

Legislators may reconsider suspending habeas corpus for detainees

 

President Bush's victory in getting the rules he wanted to try suspected terrorists could be diminished.

The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee [Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa] signaled this week that he'll join prominent Democrats in seeking to restore legal rights to hundreds of suspected terrorists confined at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.

"The Constitution of the United States is explicit that habeas corpus may be suspended only in time of rebellion or invasion," Specter said on the floor. "We are suffering neither of those alternatives at the present time. We have not been invaded, and there has not been a rebellion. That much is conceded."

"Since then, the American people have spoken against the administration's stay- the-course approach to national security and against a rubber-stamp Congress that accommodated this administration's efforts to grab more and more power," [Sen. Patrick] Leahy [D- Vt.] said. "Abolishing habeas corpus for anyone who the government thinks might have assisted enemies of the United States is unnecessary and morally wrong. It is a betrayal of the most basic values of freedom for which America stands."

These early rumblings on Capitol Hill are a far cry from actual legislation.  Hopefully this will continue to develop and be the first serious and substantial consequence of the Democrats taking over Congress after the '06 elections.

GP

Bush Administration inhumanity

Yet to be proven in court, but Jose Padilla's attorney claims in court documents that his client's treatment- torture- includes...

 

"isolation; sleep and sensory depravation; hoodings; stress positions; exposure to noxious fumes; exposure to temperature extremes; threats of imminent execution; assaults; the forced administration of mind-altering substances; denial of religious practices; manipulation of diet; and other forms of mistreatment."

 

These forms of 'aggressive interrogation techniques' would fall under Geneva defitions of torture.

 

Padilla is not a member of the Taliban or an insurgent group.  He was not captured in Afghanistan or Iraq.  He is a US citizen, from Chicago.

 

Should the government be allowed to treat anyone this way?

 

Some suggest that Americans around the world are put at risk by the Administration's reckless torture policy. 

 

True enough.

 

What Padilla demonstrates, however, is that Americans here, in the United States, are endangered by an arrogant Administration's abuse of power.

 

GP