"Releasing the memos would allow the public to better understand the legal basis for the Bush administration's national security policies; to better understand the role that the OLC played in developing, justifying, and advocating those policies; and to participate more meaningfully in the ongoing debate about national security, civil liberties, and human rights," said the ACLU in the letter.
In its letter, the ACLU called on the OLC to release, at the earliest possible date, dozens of legal memos related to interrogation, detention, rendition, surveillance and other Bush administration policies. Since 2003, the ACLU has filed three lawsuits to enforce FOIA requests seeking the OLC legal opinions and other government records. These lawsuits have resulted in the release of thousands of documents, but most of the key OLC memos are still being withheld.
"Releasing the memos would also signal to Americans, and to the world, that you intend to turn the page on an era in which the OLC served not as a source of objective legal advice but as a facilitator for the executive's lawless conduct," the letter continued.
The ACLU's letter cites President Obama's recent memoranda on "Transparency and Open Government" and FOIA. The president recognized the connection between government transparency and effective democracy, and directed federal agencies to minimize government secrecy and apply a presumption in favor of openness.
"President Obama should be commended for having made an unambiguous and historically unparalleled commitment to government transparency," said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. "We're eager to see this commitment put into practice."
More information, including a copy of the ACLU's letter to the OLC, a chart of the still-secret OLC memos, a video and information about the ACLU's FOIA litigation, is available at: www.aclu.org/safefree/general/olc_memos.html
Also today, the media organization ProPublica launched a Web feature that lists and describes the OLC memos that are still secret. The feature is based in part on information that the ACLU has obtained through FOIA litigation. It's available online at: www.propublica.org/memos
http://www.aclu.org/safefree/general/38511prs20090128.html
============
Evidence of torture 'buried by ministers'Judges condemn secrecy over files detailing treatment of suspect by CIA
Richard Norton-Taylor The Guardian, Thursday 5 February 2009 Article history
The government was accused last night of hiding behind claims of a threat to national security to suppress evidence of torture by the CIA on a
prisoner still held in Guantánamo Bay.
An unprecedented high court ruling yesterday blamed the US, with British connivance, for keeping the "powerful evidence" secret, sparking criticism
from lawyers, campaigners and MPs, who claimed the government had capitulated to American bullying.
Two senior judges said they were powerless to reveal the information about the torture of Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian-born British resident,
because David Miliband, the foreign secretary, had warned the court the US was threatening to stop sharing intelligence about terrorism with the UK.
In a scathing judgment, Lord Justice Thomas and Mr Justice Lloyd Jones said the evidence, and what MI5 knew about it, must remain secret because
according to Miliband, the American threats meant "the public of the United Kingdom would be put at risk".
The judges made clear they were unhappy with their decision, but said they had no alternative as a result of Miliband's claim. Their ruling revealed
that Miliband stuck to his position about the threat to the UK even after Barack Obama signed orders two weeks ago banning torture and announcing
the closure of the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.
Last night Miliband seemingly backtracked on his office's submission, saying there had been no threat by the US to break off intelligence co-operation.
"It's American information and it is for the Americans to decide whether to publish their information," Miliband told Channel 4 television.
Clive Stafford Smith, director of Reprieve, the legal charity and human rights group which acted for Mohamed, said last night: "The US is under a
legal duty to investigate the crime of torture, not to suppress evidence that it happened ... For the foreign secretary to give in to these illegal
demands by the Bush administration is capitulation to blackmail, pure and simple."
Yesterday's ruling was the latest in unprecedented court hearings into the abduction of Mohamed, who was seized and held incommunicado in Pakistan
in 2002 before being secretly renditioned to Morocco, where he says he was tortured. He was subsequently flown to Afghanistan before being sent to
Guantánamo Bay. He has been on hunger strike and the US and UK are discussing his possible return to the UK.
The ruling, studded with thinly disguised attacks on the attitude of the foreign secretary and the American authorities, came after the judges last
year invited the Guardian and other media groups to overturn Miliband's refusal to disclose information in the documents given to him by the US. In
a telling passage, the judges said: "Given [the documents'] source and detail, they would ... amount to powerful evidence". None of the contents at
issue could possibly be described as sensitive US intelligence, they said.
In further stinging comments they said: "Moreover, in the light of the long history of the common law and democracy which we share with the United
States, it was, in our view, very difficult to conceive that a democratically elected and accountable government could possibly have any rational
objection to placing into the public domain such a summary of what its own officials reported as to how a detainee was treated by them and which
made no disclosure of sensitive intelligence matters.
"Indeed we did not consider that a democracy governed by the rule of law would expect a court in another democracy to suppress a summary of the
evidence contained in reports by its own officials ... relevant to allegations of torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment, politically
embarrassing though it might be." The judges said yesterday: "It is plainly right that the details of the admissions in relation to the treatment
of [Mohamed] as reported by officials of the United States government should be brought into the public domain."
They urged the Obama administration to reconsider the US position and also said that parliament's intelligence and security select committee must
investigate the case in line with extended powers the committee had been granted by Gordon Brown. But the judges noted that the committee meets
in private and the prime minister can censor its reports.
The judges also emphasised that, as the Guardian reported last year, Jacqui Smith, the home secretary, had asked the attorney general to investigate
possible "criminal wrongdoing" by MI5 and the CIA over Mohamed's treatment.
A spokesman for Lady Scotland, the attorney general, said last night the matter was "still under consideration".
In earlier rulings judges described the American attitude in the case as "deeply disturbing". Miliband is expected to stand by what he told the
high court, in a Commons written statement today. He is also expected to repeat the government's condemnation of torture.
A spokesman for the US state department said: "The US thanks the UK government for its continued commitment to protect sensitive national security
information and preserve the long standing intelligence-sharing relationship that enables both countries to protect their citizens. The US
investigates allegations and claims of torture ... such as those raised by Binyam Mohamed."
Shami Chakrabarti, director of Liberty, said last night: "Despite best efforts to shine a light on the grubbiest aspects of the 'war on terror',
the Foreign Office has claimed that the Obama administration maintained a previous US threat to reconsider intelligence sharing unless our
judges kept this shameful skeleton in the closet. We find this Foreign Office allegation ... surprising." David Davis, the former shadow home
secretary, said it implied that torture had taken place and British agencies may have been complicit.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/04/guantanamo-bay-torture
===========
Bush Aware of Advisers' Interrogation Talks
President Says He Knew His Senior Advisers Discussed Tough Interrogation Methods
By JAN CRAWFORD GREENBURG, HOWARD L. ROSENBERG and ARIANE de VOGUE
April 11, 2008
President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects
would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.
"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz.
"And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."
As first reported by ABC News Wednesday, the most senior Bush administration officials repeatedly discussed and approved specific details of
exactly how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the CIA.
The high-level discussions about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation
sessions were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.
These top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of
sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding, sources told ABC news.
http://abcnews.go.com/TheLaw/LawPolitics/story?id=4635175&page=1
================
Kings and tyrants often inflicted special pain on people they viewed as challenging their authority and – at such times – they wiped away the rules of justice. But the United States was supposed to be different.
While Vice President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff David Addington treated the committee Democrats with haughty contempt, former State Department lawyer John Yoo expressed the ultimate arrogance of power with his muddled responses and evasions of direct questions.
The soft-spoken Yoo, who authored some of the key legal opinions justifying the abuse of detainees, wouldn’t even give a clear answer to the simple question of what atrocity might be beyond President Bush’s power to inflict.
Conyers posed the question more pointedly: “Could the President order a suspect buried alive?”
Yoo continued to fence with the congressman, avoiding a direct answer.
“I don’t think I ever gave advice that the President could bury somebody alive,” Yoo said, adding he believed that “no American President would ever have to order that or feel it necessary to order that.”
Pointedly, however, Yoo avoided a direct response to the question of whether he believed the President had the authority to do it.
Later in the hearing, Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tennessee, returned to the administration’s legal theories that Bush holds “plenary” – or unlimited – power at a time of war and that the President’s motivation, i.e. protecting the country, justifies taking extreme actions.
“So, if I want to take somebody’s fingernails out if I think it’s for the good of the country, that’s not torture?” Cohen asked. “If I want to cut someone’s appendage off, it’s okay as long as I think it’s important for the country? …
“Is there anything you think the President cannot order in terms of interrogation of these prisoners in a state of war?”
Again, dodging a direct answer, Yoo responded that those examples “are not addressed in these memos. … I would say there are things I don’t think any American President would order in order to protect the national security and one of those things is the torture of detainees.”
“This is the second time today … that you’ve said that you don’t believe an American President would order certain heinous acts. Would you answer the question, not would he order it, but could he order it under the law in your opinion?”
Yoo responded, “It’s not fair to ask that question without any kind of facts,” prompting Nadler to rephrase the question again:
“There’s nothing conceivable to which you could answer ‘no’ that an American President could not order this without knowing facts and context?”
Yoo: “I can’t agree with that because you are trying to put words in my mouth attempting to get me to answer some broad question covering all circumstances and I can’t do that.”
Though refusing to answer, Yoo reaffirmed – through his circumlocution – what has been a central tenet of Bush’s view of presidential power, that there are no limits to his power for the duration of the “war on terror,” even though it is a vague conflict that has no definable end and that is fought on a global battlefield including U.S. territory.
In other words, it is the opinion of the right-wing lawyers who have constructed this legal theory that Bush truly can do whatever he wants to whomever he wants anywhere in the world as long as he couches his actions under his Commander-in-Chief authority.
And when it comes to torture, other word games come into play, such as categorizing “waterboarding,” a form of simulated drowning that has been regarded as torture for centuries, as something other than torture. Reality is all in the eye of the all-powerful President.
Though this right-wing concept of unlimited presidential power appeals to some Americans who consider their personal safety more important than the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, it is so radical a break with American traditions that even its chief advocates, such as Yoo and Addington, duck and weave when the questions are presented directly.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2008/062608.html
===============
While it has been known for some time that the CIA had destroyed tapes of interrogations with terrorism suspects, Monday's news that 92 videotapes had been destroyed by the agency was still shocking.
The CIA acknowledged the number of tape erasures in a letter filed by government lawyers in New York. The letter was filed in response to an ongoing lawsuit from the the American Civil Liberties Union that is seeking more details of terror interrogation programs.
The ACLU immediately called for the judge to issue a "prompt finding of contempt" against the CIA.
Amrit Singh, an attorney with the ACLU and counsel on the case said to Raw Story, “The large number of video tapes destroyed confirms that this was a systemic attempt to evade court orders.”
Singh added, "It’s about time, now that the court knows 92 tapes have been destroyed, that it hold the CIA accountable for the destruction of the tapes."
The letter was submitted when the court's stay of consideration of the ACLU's contempt motion expired on Feb. 28. John Durham, the acting United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who is conducting the criminal investigation into the destruction of any interrogation tapes, did not request an additional stay.
According to the letter, which can be viewed here, the CIA is now gathering information in response to the Court’s order to provide a list identifying and describing each of the destroyed records, as well as transcripts or summaries from any of the destroyed records and the names of any witnesses who may have viewed the videotapes before their destruction. The CIA requested that it be given until March 6 to provide the court with a timeline for its response to the requested information.
In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for its destruction of videotapes in violation of a court order requiring the agency to produce or identify all the requested records. That motion is still pending, according to a release from the ACLU.
The ACLU contends that the tapes should have been identified and processed in response to its FOIA request for information on the treatment and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody.
The tapes became a contentious issue in the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, after prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.
This latest news of CIA tape erasures dovetails into Senate plans to hold a review of the agency's detention and interrogation program. The Senate Intelligence Committee plans to investigate whether the steps taken by the CIA to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects were properly authorized.
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Breaking_CIA_destroyed_92_interrogation_tapes_0302.html
http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/lettertohellerstein_ciainterrogationtapes.pdf
====================
The Torture Administration Continued: Former Gitmo Guard Speaks Out
An Army private who served at Guantanamo Bay --- previously deterred by fear of retaliation -- is speaking out about his experiences there. (Harper's) Scott Horton quotes the AP interview:
“The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong,” he told the Associated Press. Neely describes the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb, he details their sexual abuse by medical personnel, torture by other medical personnel, brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution, the first hunger strike and its causes, torturous shackling, positional torture, interference with religious practices and beliefs, verbal abuse, restriction of recreation, the behavior of mentally ill detainees, an isolation regime that was put in place for child-detainees, and his conversations with prisoners David Hicks and Rhuhel Ahmed. (Harper's; emphasis added)
Non-liberal Andrew Sullivan points out the reason why it's so important to consider the source.
We were long told that the grueling accounts of torture, sexual abuse, and mental terror inflicted under orders from president Bush in Guantanamo Bay (and many other sites in the war on Jihadist terrorism) were lies. The testimony came from Jihadists, after all.... But then came the testimony from FBI agents who saw the barbarism authorized in the camp; and increasingly, more and more US service members have come forward to testify to rigged trials, orchestrated sadism, instrumental rape as policy and abuse of medical ethics.
Neely's gone into quite a lot of detail.
Neely’s comprehensive account runs to roughly 15,000 words. It was compiled by law students at the University of California at Davis and can be accessed here.
But just looking at that list I quoted from Horton's article? That's a lot of wrong things right there.
Let's go through the list of things he saw and did that were wrong a little more systematically.
the arrival of detainees in full sensory-deprivation garb
sexual abuse by medical personnel
torture by other medical personnel
brutal beatings out of frustration, fear, and retribution
torturous shackling, positional torture
interference with religious practices and beliefs
verbal abuse
restriction of recreation
an isolation regime...put in place for child-detainees.
Yes, yes, I know. The United States under George W. Bush has not and would never, ever engage in "torture." George W. Bush would never, ever countenance torture unless it was absolutely necessary. It's all in how you define "torture."
Oh, but there's more.
Neely discusses at some length the notion of IRF (initial reaction force), a technique devised to brutalize or physically beat a detainee under the pretense that he required being physically subdued. The IRF approach was devised to use a perceived legal loophole in the prohibition on torture. Neely’s testimony makes clear that IRF was understood by everyone, including the prison guards who applied it, as a subterfuge for beating and mistreating prisoners....
Further to this point, Andrew Sullivan quotes from the 15,000 words of Private Brandon Neely.
By the time the IRF team was coming off the block and I was walking back towards Alpha Block I noticed a couple of the guys had blood on their arms, hands, and uniforms. They were washing their hands with water. The detainee was escorted off the block to medical, where he was given stitches for multiple lacerations to his head. Later that day I came back on the block and saw the cage this detainee was IRFed in. The cement floor was a dull red color from the blood. You could tell at one point before it was washed out that there was a lot of blood on the floor of that cage.
Want another example? This one comes via NION and illustrates what happened to Gitmo prisoners who called a female MP a bitch.
For punishment, the IRF team was called upon to enter the cage and hog-tie the detainee. The female MP was very upset, yelling "Whip his ass!"
The IRF team, along with the camp OIC, approached the detainee's cage and told him to stop yelling and lay down so he could be restrained. The detainee just stood there, staring at them. The IRF team lined up in position to enter the cage. The OIC unlocked the lock on the cage door and, when this was done, the detainee turned around, went to his knees and placed his hands on the top of his head. The lock was taken off and the cage door was opened. The Number One Man on the IRF team tossed his shield to the side and, with a quick run towards the detainee, hopped in the air and came down on the back of the detainee with his knee (the Number One guy on the IRF team was no small guy). This caused the detainee to fall to the cement floor of the cage with the Number One Man on top of him. Then the whole IRF team was on top of him hitting, punching, and kicking him. It seemed like a long time, but in reality it lasted 15-20 seconds.
While the IRF team was still on top of the detainee someone yelled for the female MP that was called a bitch. She entered the cage and she punched the detainee a couple times in the head and then left the cage. Everyone in the cage stood up and the detainee laid there cuffed-up but motionless and unresponsive. Next thing I saw were medics coming from the medical house with a stretcher. They left the block with the detainee on the stretcher; they took him to a waiting military ambulance and was transported to the main hospital. The IRF team would ride along with the detainee. I went back to work not fully knowing what was wrong or what happened to the detainee.
Later that night, after we had been off for a while, the IRF team came back from the hospital. They would go on and talk about how they hit and punched the detainee and how they held him down so the female MP could hit him a couple times. They went on to talk about the ambulance ride saying no one spoke and it was a very silent ride. One of them even stated the detainee went into cardiac arrest in the ambulance.
Neely further observed:
Every time I witnessed an IRFing a camera was present, but one of two things would happen: (1) the camera would never be turned on, or (2) the camera would be on, but pointed straight at the ground. In the incident on Bravo Block I spoke about I found out through talking to people and hearing them joke that the video of the incident was destroyed. (NION)
Also: how disturbing is Neely's confirmation that medical professionals did their bit to enhance the detainees' interrogation?
So disturbing. Horton sums it up:
[H]ealth professionals are right in the thick of the torture and abuse of the prisoners—suggesting a systematic collapse of professional ethics driven by the Pentagon itself. He describes body searches undertaken for no legitimate security purpose, simply to sexually invade and humiliate the prisoners. This was a standardized Bush Administration tactic–the importance of which became apparent to me when I participated in some Capitol Hill negotiations with White House representatives relating to legislation creating criminal law accountability for contractors. The Bush White House vehemently objected to provisions of the law dealing with rape by instrumentality. (Harper's)
Horton and those present were curious about why Bush & Co. didn't want accountability for rape by instrumentality.
When House negotiators pressed to know why, they were met first with silence and then an embarrassed acknowledgement that a key part of the Bush program included invasion of the bodies of prisoners in a way that might be deemed rape by instrumentality under existing federal and state criminal statutes. While these techniques have long been known, the role of health care professionals in implementing them is shocking. (Harper's)
I ought to be beyond being shocked by anything that happened under Bush/Cheney and yet I go on being shocked, every time.
Digby reminds us that we already knew about sodomy by instrumentality and forced enemas.
There was also this....
A US military investigation, carried out by Major General Antonio Taguba, uncovered evidence of war crimes against the inmates, including: breaking chemical lights and pouring the phosphoric liquid on detainees; pouring cold water on naked detainees; beating detainees with a broom handle and a chair; threatening male detainees with rape; sodomizing a detainee with a chemical light and perhaps a broom stick (Harper's).
So what do we want to do about it? Joe Conason argues that we should pardon the perpetrators because, let's face it, it would be the politically prudent approach. After all, he argues, we have "more urgent" issues to address.
Jane Hamsher thinks otherwise.
These are not "political offenses," these are crimes. And despite the propensity of those who committed them to wrap themselves in the flag and claim they did it for America, there is no way to justify anal rape as an expression of anything other than extreme sadism....
Can we stop casting this as vengeance? Can we stop painting people who believe that something terrible was lost during the last eight years, something moral and decent and good at the core of the American soul, as little more than "angry" and "vindictive?" And can we stop assuming that there is something magnanimous about a "bipartisanship" that exists only when both sides agree to walk into the next room and pretend that the pile of wreckage we leave behind, the one that nobody wants to look, isn't still on fire?...
We don't live in a box, and this isn't all about making ourselves feel good. We inflicted a lot of pain on the world, and they are looking to see how we deal with it. We owe them, and ourselves, more than a "group hug."
Amen to that.
For heart-shattering excerpts from Pvt Neely's report, as well as information about Neely himself, see NION here.
Makes you really wonder about extraordinary rendition and why the Bush administration thought it was needed if this is how the prisoners at Guantanamo were being treated.
http://bucknakedpolitics.typepad.com/buck_naked_politics/2009/02/former-gitmo-guard-speaks-out.html
===============