:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::

:: 3.16.2009 ::

:: Red Cross report: CIA tortured terror suspects ::

The Associated Press
WASHINGTON — The CIA's secret interrogation program amounted to torture for some of the 14 "high-value detainees" held by the agency, according to published excerpts of an internal 2006 report by the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The ICRC report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalist and professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and excerpted in the April 9 issue of the New York Review of Books.

The neutral, Swiss-based ICRC is designated by the Geneva Conventions on warfare to visit prisoners of war and other people detained by an occupying power, to ensure countries respect their obligations under the 1949 accords.

ICRC officials would not confirm details of the report to The Associated Press and denied leaking it.

"We regret that information attributed to the ICRC has been made public. We share our observations and concerns related to U.S. detentions as part of the confidential dialogue we maintain with U.S. authorities and so we do not wish to comment on the substance of the article," said Simon Schorno, a spokesman for the Geneva headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross.

The ICRC generally refuses to comment on its prisoner-of-war investigations, reasoning that it undermines the organization's ability to gain access to the prisoners and influence how they are treated.

A U.S. official familiar with the ICRC report noted that the claims of abuse were made by the alleged terrorists themselves. The official asked to speak anonymously because the CIA interrogation program is classified.

The ICRC was granted private access by the Bush administration to the 14 prisoners after they were moved from secret interrogation sites and prisons to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in 2006.

According to the report, as described by Danner, the prisoners separately and consistently described long-term solitary confinement, waterboarding — which simulates drowning — prolonged stress positions, forced prolonged nudity, beatings, denial of solid food and other forms of abuse.

"The allegations of ill-treatment of the detainees indicate that, in many cases, the ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture. In addition, many other elements of the ill-treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment," states the report, according to Danner.

The report was written shortly after then-President George W. Bush publicly declared that the United States does not and had not tortured detainees at secret CIA prisons known as "black sites."

Read more here.

A L S O

Call It Torture
Washington Post

Here's another good reason to have some sort of authoritative public reckoning of the Bush administration's dark legacy: Until we deal with it once and for all, it will come back to haunt us time and time again.

US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites
By Mark Danner
The New York Times

We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. Bush and his administration have seemed to be rushing away from us at accelerating speed, a dark comet hurtling toward the ends of the universe. The phrase "War on Terror"—the signal slogan of that administration, so cherished by the man who took pride in proclaiming that he was "a wartime president"—has acquired in its pronouncement a permanent pair of quotation marks, suggesting something questionable, something mildly embarrassing: something past. And yet the decisions that that president made, especially the monumental decisions taken after the attacks of September 11, 2001—decisions about rendition, surveillance, interrogation—lie strewn about us still, unclaimed and unburied, like corpses freshly dead.

How should we begin to talk about this?

Read more here.

Tales From Torture’s Dark World
By MARK DANNER
NYT Op-Ed

ON a bright sunny day two years ago, President George W. Bush strode into the East Room of the White House and informed the world that the United States had created a dark and secret universe to hold and interrogate captured terrorists.

“In addition to the terrorists held at Guantánamo,” the president said, “a small number of suspected terrorist leaders and operatives captured during the war have been held and questioned outside the United States, in a separate program operated by the Central Intelligence Agency.”

At these places, Mr. Bush said, “the C.I.A. used an alternative set of procedures.” He added: “These procedures were designed to be safe, to comply with our laws, our Constitution and our treaty obligations. The Department of Justice reviewed the authorized methods extensively and determined them to be lawful.” This speech will stand, I believe, as George W. Bush’s most important: perhaps the only historic speech he ever gave. In his fervent defense of his government’s “alternative set of procedures” and his equally fervent insistence that they were “lawful,” he set out before the country America’s dark moral epic of torture, in the coils of whose contradictions we find ourselves entangled still.

At the same time, perhaps unwittingly, Mr. Bush made it possible that day for those on whom the alternative set of procedures were performed eventually to speak. For he announced that he would send 14 “high-value detainees” from dark into twilight: they would be transferred from the overseas “black sites” to Guantánamo. There, while awaiting trial, the International Committee of the Red Cross would be “advised of their detention, and will have the opportunity to meet with them.”

A few weeks later, from Oct. 6 to 11 and then from Dec. 4 to 14, 2006, Red Cross officials — whose duty it is to monitor compliance with the Geneva Conventions and to supervise treatment of prisoners of war — traveled to Guantánamo and began interviewing the prisoners.

Their stated goal was to produce a report that would “provide a description of the treatment and material conditions of detention of the 14 during the period they were held in the C.I.A. detention program,” periods ranging “from 16 months to almost four and a half years.”

As the Red Cross interviewers informed the detainees, their report was not intended to be released to the public but, “to the extent that each detainee agreed for it to be transmitted to the authorities,” to be given in strictest secrecy to officials of the government agency that had been in charge of holding them — in this case the Central Intelligence Agency, to whose acting general counsel, John Rizzo, the report was sent on Feb. 14, 2007.

The result is a document — labeled “confidential” and clearly intended only for the eyes of those senior American officials — that tells a story of what happened to each of the 14 detainees inside the black sites.

Read more here.

More info from Danner [in .pdf]

posted by me

:: 3:12:00 PM [+] ::
...

:: Bush-Era Anti-Terrorism Documents Made Public ::

Washington Post
By R. Jeffrey Smith and Dan Eggen

The number of major legal errors committed by Bush administration lawyers during the formulation of its early counterterrorism policies was far greater than previously known, according to internal Bush administration documents released for the first time by the Justice Department yesterday.

Those policies were based on at least 10 legal opinions conferring broad powers on the president that the Justice Department later deemed flawed and ordered withdrawn, including several approving the military's search, detention or trial of civilians in the United States without congressional input, according to the documents.

While the Bush administration had previously acknowledged rescinding two of those memos -- authorizing the infliction of pain and suffering on detainees and claiming unquestioned authority to interrogate suspects outside the United States -- the government's eventual repudiation or rewrite of the eight other early legal memos was secret until now.

In one of the newly disclosed opinions, Justice Department appointee John Yoo argued that constitutional provisions ensuring free speech and barring warrantless searches could be disregarded by the president in wartime, allowing troops to storm a building if they suspected terrorists might be inside. In another, the department asserted that detainees could be transferred to countries known to commit human rights abuses so long as U.S. officials did not intentionally seek their torture.

The opinions were initially drafted -- and later repudiated at least in part -- by the Justice Department's storied Office of Legal Counsel, which issues interpretations of laws and presidential authorities considered binding on the entire executive branch. The multiple policy shifts during Bush's two presidential terms reflect an unprecedented degree of turmoil in that office, experts say.

In releasing some of the discredited memos, including three that the Bush administration had argued must be kept secret as recently as November, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. declared that "Americans deserve a government that operates with transparency and openness." He also said he hoped to make future legal opinions by his department on such matters "available when possible while still protecting national security information and ensuring robust internal" debate.

The new batch of opinions does not include any repudiated by the Obama administration or reflect a government shift on the underlying legal issues since Bush's departure. They also do not include the most controversial memos that Democratic lawmakers and human rights experts have been asking to see for several years, including those justifying the CIA's use of harsh interrogation techniques and the National Security Agency's program to surveil certain Americans without warrants.

Read more here.

A L S O

In Legal Memos, Clearer View of Power Bush Sought
New York Times

Post-9/11 Military Memos Are Released
The Lede By David Stout
New York Times

The Bush/Yoo Axis
Rolling Stone

Press release from DOJ.gov:
Department of Justice Releases Nine Office of Legal Counsel Memoranda and Opinions (09-181)
WASHINGTON -- The Department of Justice today released two previously undisclosed Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memoranda and seven previously undisclosed opinions.

"Americans deserve a government that operates with transparency and openness," said Attorney General Eric Holder. "It is my goal to make OLC opinions available when possible while still protecting national security information and ensuring robust internal executive branch debate and decision-making."

The two memoranda memorialized that certain legal propositions in ten OLC opinions issued between 2001 and 2003 no longer reflected the views of OLC and "should not be treated as authoritative for any purpose." They further explained that some of the underlying opinions had been withdrawn or superseded and that "caution should be exercised" by the executive branch "before relying in other respects" on the other opinions that had not been superseded or withdrawn.

In light of the legitimate and substantial public interest in many of the questions raised in those opinions and in the evolution of OLC’s views on those questions, the Department has released the six of those underlying opinions from 2001-2003 that are not classified and that had not previously been disclosed.

In November 2008, the Department filed a motion in a pending civil action to submit two of those underlying OLC opinions, along with one other, to the court under seal. The Department has determined that there is no longer any reason the three opinions should remain under seal and is therefore withdrawing its motion.

The opinions and memoranda are available at usdoj.gov/opa/documents/olc-memos.htm.

posted by me

:: 10:26:00 PM [+] ::
...