U.S. Has Detained 83,000 in War on Terror -108 DEAD

muckraker10021 · Dec 8, 2005

<table id="table4" bgcolor="#bf001f" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="44%"> <tr><td width="181"><img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10028/Republiklan.jpg"><img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10028/Republiklan.jpg"></td> <td bgcolor="#bf001f"> <table id="table5" bordercolorlight="#BF001F" bordercolordark="#BF001F" bgcolor="#bf001f" border="5" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="335" width="200"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://www.nypress.com/17/31/news&columns/BUSH-FEATURE-300.jpg" border="0" height="335" width="200"></td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table>


ABC News was told that at least three CIA officers declined to be trained in torture techniques before a cadre of 14 were selected to use them...

"What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust … than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets." --Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer



<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"></hr>

<table border="7" style="border-collapse: collapse" width="750" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#F4FFFF">
<tr><td>
<img src="http://abcnews.go.com/images/site/printlogo.jpg">

U.S. Has Detained 83,000 in War on Terror 

"108 detainees were known to have died in U.S. military and CIA custody"

by KATHERINE SHRADER,
Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, November 16, 2005

(11-16) 11:56 PST WASHINGTON, (AP) --

The United States has detained more than 83,000 foreigners in the four years of the war on terror, enough to nearly fill the NFL's largest stadium. The administration defends the practice of holding detainees in prisons from Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay as a critical tool to stop the insurgency in Iraq, maintain stability in Afghanistan and get known and suspected terrorists off the streets.

Roughly 14,500 detainees remain in U.S. custody, primarily in Iraq.

The number has steadily grown since the first CIA paramilitary officers touched down in Afghanistan in the fall of 2001, setting up more than 20 facilities including the "Salt Pit," an abandoned factory outside Kabul used for CIA detention and interrogation.

In Iraq, the number in military custody hit a peak on Nov. 1, according to military figures. Nearly 13,900 suspects were in U.S. custody there that day — partly because U.S. offensives in western Iraq put pressure on insurgents before the October constitutional referendum and December parliamentary elections.

The detentions and interrogations have brought complaints from Congress and human-rights groups about how the detainees — often Arab and male — are treated.

International law and treaty obligations forbid torture and inhumane treatment. Classified memos have given the government ways to extract intelligence from detainees "consistent with the law," administration officials often say.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is leading a campaign to ban cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. The administration says the legislation could tie the president's hands. Vice President Dick Cheney has pressed lawmakers to exempt the CIA.

"There's an enemy that lurks and plots and plans and wants to hurt America again. And so you bet we will aggressively pursue them. But we will do so under the law," President Bush said last week.

Some 82,400 people have been detained by the military alone in Afghanistan and Iraq, according to figures from officials in Baghdad and Washington. Many are freed shortly after initial questioning.

To put that in context, the capacity of the Washington Redskins' FedEx Field, the NFL's largest, is 91,704. The second largest, Giants Stadium, holds 80,242.

An additional 700 detainees were sent to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Just under 500 remain there now.

In Iraq, the Defense Department says 5,569 detainees have been held for more than six months, and 3,801 have been held more than a year. Some 229 have been locked up for more than two years.

Many have been questioned by military officials trained at the main U.S. interrogation school, Fort Huachuca in Arizona. Pentagon officials say those mistreated are relatively few when the sheer numbers are considered.

Yet human rights groups say they don't know the extent of the abuse. "And there is no way anyone could, even if the military was twice as conscientious. It is unknowable, unless you assume that every act of abuse is immediately reported up the chain of command," said Tom Malinowski, Washington director for Human Rights Watch.

As of March, 108 detainees were known to have died in U.S. military and CIA custody, including 22 who died when insurgents attacked Abu Ghraib and others who died of natural causes. At least 26 deaths have been investigated as criminal homicides.

Last week, Senate Armed Services Chairman John Warner, R-Va., said that more than 400 criminal investigations have been conducted and 95 military personnel have been charged with misconduct. Seventy-five have been convicted.

Through the CIA, a much smaller prison population is maintained secretly by the agency and friendly governments. A network of known or suspected facilities — some of which have been closed — have been located in places including Thailand, Central Asia and Eastern Europe.

The governments of Thailand and a number of Eastern Europe countries have denied the CIA operated prisons within their borders. The agency consistently declines to comment.

About 100 to 150 people are believed to have been grabbed by CIA officers and sent to their home countries or to other nations where they were wanted for prosecution, a procedure called "rendition." Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt are known to cooperate.

The practice has taken on a negative connotation, but that wasn't always the case. In a December 2002 speech touching on intelligence successes, former CIA Director George Tenet said the agency and FBI had "rendered 70 terrorists to justice."

While officials won't confirm the number, another two to three dozen "high-value" detainees are also believed to be in CIA custody. Among them, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, an alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks.

As House Intelligence chairman in 2004, CIA Director Porter Goss took a strong stand on some of the gray areas of detention practices. In an AP interview, he said, "Gee, you're breaking my heart" in response to complaints that Arab men found it abusive to have women guards at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.

Before Goss took over the agency, its inspector general completed a report on the treatment of detainees, following investigations into at least four prisoner deaths that may have involved CIA personnel. To date, one agency contractor has been charged.

The inspector general's report discussed tactics used by CIA personnel — called "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques." Former intelligence officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the practices are classified, say some interrogation techniques are well-known: exposing prisoners to cold, depriving them of sleep or forcing them to stand in stressful positions.

Perhaps the most publicly controversial technique is waterboarding, when a detainee is strapped to a board and has water run over him to simulate drowning.

___

AP Military Writer Robert Burns contributed to this report.



<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"></hr>

<img src="http://abcnews.go.com/images/site/printlogo.jpg">

CIA's Harsh Interrogation Techniques Described

Sources Say Agency's Tactics Lead to
Questionable Confessions, Sometimes to Death



By BRIAN ROSS and RICHARD ESPOSITO

Nov. 18, 2005 — - Harsh interrogation techniques authorized by top officials of the CIA have led to questionable confessions and the death of a detainee since the techniques were first authorized in mid-March 2002, ABC News has been told by former and current intelligence officers and supervisors.

They say they are revealing specific details of the techniques, and their impact on confessions, because the public needs to know the direction their agency has chosen. All gave their accounts on the condition that their names and identities not be revealed. Portions of their accounts are corrobrated by public statements of former CIA officers and by reports recently published that cite a classified CIA Inspector General's report.

Other portions of their accounts echo the accounts of escaped prisoners from one CIA prison in Afghanistan.

"They would not let you rest, day or night. Stand up, sit down, stand up, sit down. Don't sleep. Don't lie on the floor," one prisoner said through a translator. The detainees were also forced to listen to rap artist Eminem's "Slim Shady" album. The music was so foreign to them it made them frantic, sources said.

Contacted after the completion of the ABC News investigation, CIA officials would neither confirm nor deny the accounts. They simply declined to comment.

The CIA sources described a list of six "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" instituted in mid-March 2002 and used, they said, on a dozen top al Qaeda targets incarcerated in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions from Asia to Eastern Europe. According to the sources, only a handful of CIA interrogators are trained and authorized to use the techniques:

1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.

2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.

3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury. Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could cause lasting internal damage.

4. Long Time Standing: This technique is described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation are effective in yielding confessions.

5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.

6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to bring the treatment to a halt.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

"The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

The techniques are controversial among experienced intelligence agency and military interrogators. Many feel that a confession obtained this way is an unreliable tool. Two experienced officers have told ABC that there is little to be gained by these techniques that could not be more effectively gained by a methodical, careful, psychologically based interrogation. According to a classified report prepared by the CIA Inspector General John Helgerwon and issued in 2004, the techniques "appeared to constitute cruel, and degrading treatment under the (Geneva) convention," the New York Times reported on Nov. 9, 2005.

It is "bad interrogation. I mean you can get anyone to confess to anything if the torture's bad enough," said former CIA officer Bob Baer.

Larry Johnson, a former CIA officer and a deputy director of the State Department's office of counterterrorism, recently wrote in the Los Angeles Times, "What real CIA field officers know firsthand is that it is better to build a relationship of trust … than to extract quick confessions through tactics such as those used by the Nazis and the Soviets."

One argument in favor of their use: time. In the early days of al Qaeda captures, it was hoped that speeding confessions would result in the development of important operational knowledge in a timely fashion.

However, ABC News was told that at least three CIA officers declined to be trained in the techniques before a cadre of 14 were selected to use them on a dozen top al Qaeda suspects in order to obtain critical information. In at least one instance, ABC News was told that the techniques led to questionable information aimed at pleasing the interrogators and that this information had a significant impact on U.S. actions in Iraq.

According to CIA sources, Ibn al Shaykh al Libbi, after two weeks of enhanced interrogation, made statements that were designed to tell the interrogators what they wanted to hear. Sources say Al Libbi had been subjected to each of the progressively harsher techniques in turn and finally broke after being water boarded and then left to stand naked in his cold cell overnight where he was doused with cold water at regular intervals.

His statements became part of the basis for the Bush administration claims that Iraq trained al Qaeda members to use biochemical weapons. Sources tell ABC that it was later established that al Libbi had no knowledge of such training or weapons and fabricated the statements because he was terrified of further harsh treatment.

"This is the problem with using the waterboard. They get so desperate that they begin telling you what they think you want to hear," one source said.

However, sources said, al Libbi does not appear to have sought to intentionally misinform investigators, as at least one account has stated. The distinction in this murky world is nonetheless an important one. Al Libbi sought to please his investigators, not lead them down a false path, two sources with firsthand knowledge of the statements said.

When properly used, the techniques appear to be closely monitored and are signed off on in writing on a case-by-case, technique-by-technique basis, according to highly placed current and former intelligence officers involved in the program. In this way, they say, enhanced interrogations have been authorized for about a dozen high value al Qaeda targets -- Khalid Sheik Mohammed among them. According to the sources, all of these have confessed, none of them has died, and all of them remain incarcerated.

While some media accounts have described the locations where these detainees are located as a string of secret CIA prisons -- a gulag, as it were -- in fact, sources say, there are a very limited number of these locations in use at any time, and most often they consist of a secure building on an existing or former military base. In addition, they say, the prisoners usually are not scattered but travel together to these locations, so that information can be extracted from one and compared with others. Currently, it is believed that one or more former Soviet bloc air bases and military installations are the Eastern European location of the top suspects. Khalid Sheik Mohammed is among the suspects detained there, sources said.

The sources told ABC that the techniques, while progressively aggressive, are not deemed torture, and the debate among intelligence officers as to whether they are effective should not be underestimated. There are many who feel these techniques, properly supervised, are both valid and necessary, the sources said. While harsh, they say, they are not torture and are reserved only for the most important and most difficult prisoners.

According to the sources, when an interrogator wishes to use a particular technique on a prisoner, the policy at the CIA is that each step of the interrogation process must be signed off at the highest level -- by the deputy director for operations for the CIA. A cable must be sent and a reply received each time a progressively harsher technique is used. The described oversight appears tough but critics say it could be tougher. In reality, sources said, there are few known instances when an approval has not been granted. Still, even the toughest critics of the techniques say they are relatively well monitored and limited in use.

Two sources also told ABC that the techniques -- authorized for use by only a handful of trained CIA officers -- have been misapplied in at least one instance.

The sources said that in that case a young, untrained junior officer caused the death of one detainee at a mud fort dubbed the "salt pit" that is used as a prison. They say the death occurred when the prisoner was left to stand naked throughout the harsh Afghanistan night after being doused with cold water. He died, they say, of hypothermia.

According to the sources, a second CIA detainee died in Iraq and a third detainee died following harsh interrogation by Department of Defense personnel and contractors in Iraq. CIA sources said that in the DOD case, the interrogation was harsh, but did not involve the CIA.

The Kabul fort has also been the subject of confusion. Several intelligence sources involved in both the enhanced interrogation program and the program to ship detainees back to their own country for interrogation -- a process described as rendition, say that the number of detainees in each program has been added together to suggest as many as 100 detainees are moved around the world from one secret CIA facility to another. In the rendition program, foreign nationals captured in the conflict zones are shipped back to their own countries on occasion for interrogation and prosecution.

There have been several dozen instances of rendition. There have been a little over a dozen authorized enhanced interrogations. As a result, the enhanced interrogation program has been described as one encompassing 100 or more prisoners. Multiple CIA sources told ABC that it is not. The renditions have also been described as illegal. They are not, our sources said, although they acknowledge the procedures are in an ethical gray area and are at times used for the convenience of extracting information under harsher conditions that the U.S. would allow.

ABC was told that several dozen renditions of this kind have occurred. Jordan is one country recently cited as an "emerging" center for renditions, according to published reports. The ABC sources said that rendition of this sort are legal and should not be confused with illegal "snatches" of targets off the streets of a home country by officers of yet another country. The United States is currently charged with such an illegal rendition in Italy. Israel and at least one European nation have also been accused of such renditions.

Copyright © 2005 ABC News Internet Ventures


</td> </tr>

</table>

Makkonnen · Dec 8, 2005

these people wont care until it happens to them or their own

Greed · Dec 8, 2005

0.13% of people have died in US custody.

i'm fine with that especially since before this post the party line was that nothing was being done.

how many of the 83000 were detained by mistake? just the one guy? i hope its a bigger number than that considering all the crying thats being done.

Havoc · Dec 8, 2005

All this is being said like some of the same stuff won't be done to US soldiers if and when they're caught...

Greed · Dec 9, 2005

this stuff wouldnt be done to a US soldier if he was caught by terrorist.

the soldier would be out right beaten for a while, paraded for al jazeera, then beheaded.

you'll never hear outrage about what terrorist do, but you will get a 1000 word post about how america deserves what it gets.

i guarantee i could do a search of certain people's posts and i wont find ONE instance of them condemning terrorist acts. not one. but you will find alot how america is whats wrong with the world.

Fuckallyall · Dec 9, 2005

Greed said:
this stuff wouldnt be done to a US soldier if he was caught by terrorist.

the soldier would be out right beaten for a while, paraded for al jazeera, then beheaded.

you'll never hear outrage about what terrorist do, but you will get a 1000 word post about how america deserves what it gets.

i guarantee i could do a search of certain people's posts and i wont find ONE instance of them condemning terrorist acts. not one. but you will find alot how america is whats wrong with the world.

Yup. And "our evil deeds" would be touted as the cause for thier outrage.
:smh:

It's just like what's going on in the Sudan with the Janjaweed. Folks have bitched and moaned about the US not intervening, but not about the Janjaweed raping and pillaging WITH GOVERNMENT BACKING. :smh:

And another thing: although I'm not a big fan of torturing people, the insurgents in Iraq are not protected by the Geneva convention. The convention covers soldiers part of a regular force that have open war. The convention also bars A: not being in combat without a uniform (to help prevent civilian casualties) and B: housing arms in populated civilian areas (once again, to help prevent civilian casualties). But NOBODY is going to bitch and moan about that. It is solely that the US is wrong.

Temujin · Dec 9, 2005

This shit is very sad. We are ruining any moral credibility we had in the world with these fascist tactics. We refuse to follow the treatise we signed. We operate like a dictatorship. We are committing the same atrocities we condemn other countries for. How can we go to China and tell them to release disadents when we have secret prisons. How can we tell North Korea to stop torturing prisoners if we torture prisoners. I thought I lived in a country where human rights were given high value.

God forbid we ever get into a war with a superpower because it is going to be ugly. U.S. citizens abroad will be caputered sent to secret prisons tortured and possibly killed. And the world will not stand up in outrage they will say these are your tactics America. This is how you wage war.

Greed · Dec 9, 2005

Temujin said:
This shit is very sad. We are ruining any moral credibility we had in the world with these fascist tactics. We refuse to follow the treatise we signed. We operate like a dictatorship. We are committing the same atrocities we condemn other countries for. How can we go to China and tell them to release disadents when we have secret prisons. How can we tell North Korea to stop torturing prisoners if we torture prisoners. I thought I lived in a country where human rights were given high value.

God forbid we ever get into a war with a superpower because it is going to be ugly. U.S. citizens abroad will be caputered sent to secret prisons tortured and possibly killed. And the world will not stand up in outrage they will say these are your tactics America. This is how you wage war.

exactly, nothing about the terrorist.

Temujin · Dec 9, 2005

Greed said:
exactly, nothing about the terrorist.

I can't control nor am I responsible for the actions of terrorists. But as a citizen of this country I am responsible for the actions of our elected leaders.

I would hope that our country does not adopt the practices of terrorists when fighting terror. Wouldn't that make us terrorists?

Greed · Dec 9, 2005

Fuckallyall said:
Yup. And "our evil deeds" would be touted as the cause for thier outrage.
It's just like what's going on in the Sudan with the Janjaweed. Folks have bitched and moaned about the US not intervening, but not about the Janjaweed raping and pillaging WITH GOVERNMENT BACKING.

And another thing: although I'm not a big fan of torturing people, the insurgents in Iraq are not protected by the Geneva convention. The convention covers soldiers part of a regular force that have open war. The convention also bars A: not being in combat without a uniform (to help prevent civilian casualties) and B: housing arms in populated civilian areas (once again, to help prevent civilian casualties). But NOBODY is going to bitch and moan about that. It is solely that the US is wrong.

i dont like the way people, for and against the war, just concede that we definitely have an official policy to torture.

just look at the practices that are pointed out in this thread:

made to stand up to make them tired. thats torture.

open hand slaps to induce fear, not injury. thats out of bounds.

some of these practices are part of a US soldier's training, but these are the things that make us whats wrong with the wrold.

as long as torture includes exposing terrorist to 50 degree temps then there will always be an excuse to paint america as nazism, pol pot, and god knows everything else.

Greed · Dec 9, 2005

Temujin said:
I can't control nor am I responsible for the actions of terrorists. But as a citizen of this country I am responsible for the actions of our elected leaders.

I would hope that our country does not adopt the practices of terrorists when fighting terror. Wouldn't that make us terrorists?

that was ALMOST an implication that terrorist are bad.

Greed · Dec 9, 2005

i find it incredible that what motivates people to finally pass judgement on certain acts is making terrorist stand up for a while, not targeting and blowing up little girls, iraqi police, or even school teachers that accepted pens and paper from US servicemembers.

what really angers you is america smearing fake period blood on a terrorist face or the "attention grab."

Temujin · Dec 9, 2005

Greed said:
that was ALMOST an implication that terrorist are bad.

Why when someone questions the terrorist actions (torture, secret prisons) of our government they are automatically pro-terrorist. Yet those who support our terrorists actions are somehow anti-terrorism.

You cannot honestly support torture and secret prisons yet think we have the moral authority to remove dictators because of similar actions. You cannot honestly think holding 83,000 people with no trial or legal representation is an American value.

You do not lay on your belly to fight a snake. You do not get on all fours to fight a dog. And you do not use torture and secret prisons to fight terrorism.

Makkonnen · Dec 9, 2005

Temujin said:
Why when someone questions the terrorist actions (torture, secret prisons) of our government they are automatically pro-terrorist. Yet those who support our terrorists actions are somehow anti-terrorism.

You cannot honestly support torture and secret prisons yet think we have the moral authority to remove dictators because of similar actions. You cannot honestly think holding 83,000 people with no trial or legal representation is an American value.

You do not lay on your belly to fight a snake. You do not get on all fours to fight a dog. And you do not use torture and secret prisons to fight terrorism.

youre preaching that to snakes and dogs though

Greed · Dec 9, 2005

once again, why is making someone stand up a long time torture and why in the hell are you implying thats something that the terrorist does.

the terrorist do not operate with such kid gloves.

america is not stooping to the terrorist level because america does not torture. its very convinient for people like you to latch onto anything that makes the enemy uncomfortable as torture because your priority is to criticize america and not condemn terrorism.

less than one tenth of a percent of american detainees have died in custody.

america is some great evil because 0.13% of those captured has died.

and yes, it is an american value because its has always been the way america has operated.

foreigners caught outside their home country fighting against america in a time of war has never been granted due process in our courts other than very specific and special circumstance.

people bitch and moan about habeas corpus, but they hvae had that right for less than a year.

the supreme court for the last 5 decade never said the wholesale right to trial to such fighter should be granted. thats why the government acted the way they have. because they had decades of precedence. then in 2004 the supreme court all of a sudden reversed itself. and now congress has put the law back the way it was.

so why all of a sudden in this decade is restricting due process to these people against american values?

Temujin · Dec 9, 2005

Greed said:
once again, why is making someone stand up a long time torture and why in the hell are you implying thats something that the terrorist does.

the terrorist do not operate with such kid gloves.

america is not stooping to the terrorist level because america does not torture. its very convinient for people like you to latch onto anything that makes the enemy uncomfortable as torture because your priority is to criticize america and not condemn terrorism.

less than one tenth of a percent of american detainees have died in custody.

america is some great evil because 0.13% of those captured has died.

and yes, it is an american value because its has always been the way america has operated.

foreigners caught outside their home country fighting against america in a time of war has never been granted due process in our courts other than very specific and special circumstance.

people bitch and moan about habeas corpus, but they hvae had that right for less than a year.

the supreme court for the last 5 decade never said the wholesale right to trial to such fighter should be granted. thats why the government acted the way they have. because they had decades of precedence. then in 2004 the supreme court all of a sudden reversed itself. and now congress has put the law back the way it was.

so why all of a sudden in this decade is restricting due process to these people against american values?

So if America does not tortue I guess all those pictures of detainees naked with dogs snapping at their nuts was photoshop. :lol:

http://www.antiwar.com/news/?articleid=2444

You are right we bombed civilians in hiroshima. We put our own citizens in internment camps during WWII with no trial. We tortured during the cold war. So I guess you are right this is in line with typical U.S. war tactics.

You have no idea how many people have died in U.S. custody because the U.S. doesn't let the public know how many people or who they have in custody.

What terrorist due is use TERROR to accomplish their goals. What we do with secret prisons and torture is use TERROR to achieve our goals. This is terrorism. If you are against terrorism how can you support these actions?

Greed · Dec 9, 2005

so as always, the worse is the truth.

a bunch of soldiers fucking up does not constitute american policy.

george bush and dick cheney did not order naked pyramid.

what has been accepted as OFFICIAL american torture is whats stated in the article. standing up for a long time. this is the torture america is accused of and this is what you are against. you want america to fight without hurting the enemy, which equals not winning.

you have zero idea how america's security apparatus works which is why you think its some perfectly controlled entity that must have presidential approval for everything thing a private does.

and if america doesnt truly let anyone know how many people have been detained and how many have been killed then why are you and your friends above treating the 83k number as fact and why is the 108 number the hard truth for you.

dont worry, i know why. the same reason its convenient for you to think bush43 ordered pfc england to have group sex in front of the abu ghraib prisoners, because what happened there was official policy.

its very funny that you think open hand slaps, being put in a 50 degree room is the moral equivalent to beheadings.

Temujin · Dec 9, 2005

So mock executions making someone believe he is being drowned is not torture. Standing naked in a 50 degree room while being dowsed with cold water is not torture. That's official.

The unofficial torture. The wink and nod by the superiors torture consists of genital electrocution dog attacks and sexual abuse.

If you are comfortable with American soldiers being treated in that manner then so be it. I am not so I do not want us to treat others in that manner. America signed treatise specifically to prevent our soldiers from being tortured while in custody. If we are not going to live up to these treatise and abide by international law then we cannot expect others too.

Torture is ineffective it is barbaric and if you feel it is the only way to get intelligence information then we are in sad shape. We have sattilites that can take pictures of what book you are reading. We have to most technologically advanced military in the world yet we have to resort to these 1940 tactics. Its sad and a shame. If we had a president who knew anything about the militatry then this would not be happening.

Greed · Dec 9, 2005

since you repeated yourself, i'll repeat myself.

1 whats describe in the article is nothing to me.

2 the terrorist do not do what we do to prisoners. they parade them on al jazeera then behead then.

3 we do not do what the terrorist do to prisoners. they parade them on al jazeera then behead then.

4 as long as being cold, made to stand up for a while, and NOT drowning someone is torture, then people like you will never be satisfied.

now here's something new, if YOU knew anything about the military then we would not be having this conversation. i cant remember having this argument with anyone that has ever been in the military. whether or not they were for or against this war.

like i said before, whats described in this article is not that different from what a soldier goes through in training, but if a terrorist is subjected to it then its cruel punishment that justifies their attitudes towards us and justifies their targeting of civilians.

at least you're consistent on where your priorities are.

tahbasco · Dec 13, 2005

I'm sorry, I don't mean to disrespect anyone here but....what the hell makes us think we are living in a country that can do no wrong? Why do so many people believe the US is SUPPOSE to be holier than thou? Do we not know our own history? Do we not know the history of these other countries who were in power long before us?

I'm not for torturing people, but this doesn't suprise me one bit. I have the common sense to know that we aren't holy and we shouldn't pretend we are. This country was founded on the backs of slaves and on the blood of Native Americans. Why do we believe we're suppose to be more moral than anyone else?

Makkonnen · Dec 13, 2005

greed and his friends/family should volunteer to be that .13% since he has no problem with it

Greed · Dec 13, 2005

interesting portrayal.

muckraker10021 · Dec 13, 2005

Temujin said:
So mock executions making someone believe he is being drowned is not torture. Standing naked in a 50 degree room while being dowsed with cold water is not torture. That's official.

The unofficial torture. The wink and nod by the superiors torture consists of genital electrocution dog attacks and sexual abuse.

If you are comfortable with American soldiers being treated in that manner then so be it. I am not so I do not want us to treat others in that manner. America signed treatise specifically to prevent our soldiers from being tortured while in custody. If we are not going to live up to these treatise and abide by international law then we cannot expect others too.

Torture is ineffective it is barbaric and if you feel it is the only way to get intelligence information then we are in sad shape. We have sattilites that can take pictures of what book you are reading. We have to most technologically advanced military in the world yet we have to resort to these 1940 tactics. Its sad and a shame. If we had a president who knew anything about the militatry then this would not be happening.

<hr noshade color="#D90000" size="14"></hr>

<img src="http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en/5/54/AbuGhraibScandalHarmon55.jpg"> 
Pictures of Manadel al-Jamadi who was tortured to death by CIA agents

<img src="http://www.antiwar.com/photos/perm/iraqiprisonerdead-thumb.gif"><img src="http://www.antiwar.com/photos/perm/torture7.jpg">

<table border="7" style="border-collapse: collapse" width="750" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#0000FF" bgcolor="#F4FFFF">
<tr><td>
<img src="http://www.newyorker.com/images/printable_logo.gif">
A DEADLY INTERROGATION

Can the C.I.A. legally kill a prisoner?


by JANE MAYER
November 14th 2005

At the end of a secluded cul-de-sac, in a fast-growing Virginia suburb favored by employees of the Central Intelligence Agency, is a handsome replica of an old-fashioned farmhouse, with a white-railed front porch. The large back yard has a swimming pool, which, on a recent October afternoon, was neatly covered. In the driveway were two cars, a late-model truck, and an all-terrain vehicle. The sole discordant note was struck by a faded American flag on the porch; instead of fluttering in the autumn breeze, it was folded on a heap of old Christmas ornaments.

The house belongs to Mark Swanner, a forty-six-year-old C.I.A. officer who has performed interrogations and polygraph tests for the agency, which has employed him at least since the nineteen-nineties. (He is not a covert operative.) Two years ago, at Abu Ghraib prison, outside Baghdad, an Iraqi prisoner in Swanner’s custody, Manadel al-Jamadi, died during an interrogation. His head had been covered with a plastic bag, and he was shackled in a crucifixion-like pose that inhibited his ability to breathe; according to forensic pathologists who have examined the case, he asphyxiated. In a subsequent internal investigation, United States government authorities classified Jamadi’s death as a “homicide,” meaning that it resulted from unnatural causes. Swanner has not been charged with a crime and continues to work for the agency.

After September 11th, the Justice Department fashioned secret legal guidelines that appear to indemnify C.I.A. officials who perform aggressive, even violent interrogations outside the United States. Techniques such as waterboarding—the near-drowning of a suspect—have been implicitly authorized by an Administration that feels that such methods may be necessary to win the war on terrorism. (In 2001, Vice-President Dick Cheney, in an interview on “Meet the Press,” said that the government might have to go to “the dark side” in handling terrorist suspects, adding, “It’s going to be vital for us to use any means at our disposal.”) The harsh treatment of Jamadi and other prisoners in C.I.A. custody, however, has inspired an emotional debate in Washington, raising questions about what limits should be placed on agency officials who interrogate foreign terrorist suspects outside U.S. territory.

This fall, in response to the exposure of widespread prisoner abuse at American detention facilities abroad—among them Abu Ghraib; Guantánamo Bay, in Cuba; and Bagram Air Base, in Afghanistan—John McCain, the Republican senator from Arizona, introduced a bill in Congress that would require Americans holding prisoners abroad to follow the same standards of humane treatment required at home by the U.S. Constitution. Prisoners must not be brutalized, the bill states, regardless of their “nationality or physical location.” On October 5th, in a rebuke to President Bush, who strongly opposed McCain’s proposal, the Senate voted 90–9 in favor of it.

Senior Administration officials have led a fierce, and increasingly visible, fight to protect the C.I.A.’s classified interrogation protocol. Late last month, Cheney and Porter Goss, the C.I.A. director, had an unusual forty-five-minute private meeting on Capitol Hill with Senator McCain, who was tortured as a P.O.W. during the Vietnam War. They argued that the C.I.A. sometimes needs the “flexibility” to treat detainees in the war on terrorism in “cruel, inhuman, and degrading” ways. Cheney sought to add an exemption to McCain’s bill, permitting brutal methods when “such operations are vital to the protection of the United States or its citizens from terrorist attack.” A Washington Post editorial decried Cheney’s visit, calling him the “Vice-President for Torture.” In the coming weeks, a conference committee of the House and the Senate will decide whether McCain’s proposal becomes law; three of the nine senators who voted against the measure are on the committee.

The outcome of this wider political debate may play a role in determining the fate of Swanner, whose name has not been publicly disclosed before, and who declined several requests to be interviewed. Passage of the McCain legislation by both Houses of Congress would mean that there is strong political opposition to the abusive treatment of prisoners, and would put increased pressure on the Justice Department to prosecute interrogators like Swanner—who could conceivably be charged with assault, negligent manslaughter, or torture. Swanner’s lawyer, Nina Ginsberg, declined to discuss his case on the record. But he has been under investigation by the Justice Department for more than a year.

Manadel al-Jamadi was captured by Navy SEALs at 2 a.m. on November 4, 2003, after a violent struggle at his house, outside Baghdad. Jamadi savagely fought one of the SEALs before being subdued in his kitchen; during the altercation, his stove fell on them. The C.I.A. had identified him as a “high-value” target, because he had allegedly supplied the explosives used in several atrocities perpetrated by insurgents, including the bombing of the Baghdad headquarters of the International Committee of the Red Cross, in October, 2003. After being removed from his house, Jamadi was manhandled by several of the SEALs, who gave him a black eye and a cut on his face; he was then transferred to C.I.A. custody, for interrogation at Abu Ghraib. According to witnesses, Jamadi was walking and speaking when he arrived at the prison. He was taken to a shower room for interrogation. Some forty-five minutes later, he was dead.

For most of the time that Jamadi was being interrogated at Abu Ghraib, there were only two people in the room with him. One was an Arabic-speaking translator for the C.I.A. working on a private contract, who has been identified in military-court papers only as “Clint C.” He was given immunity against criminal prosecution in exchange for his coöperation. The other person was Mark Swanner.

In the spring of 2004, the fact of pervasive prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib became public, on “60 Minutes II” and in a series of articles in these pages by Seymour M. Hersh. Photographs, taken by U.S. soldiers, that showed Iraqi prisoners being hooded, sexually humiliated, and threatened with dogs were published around the world. One of the most harrowing images was of Jamadi’s severely battered corpse, which had been wrapped in plastic and put on ice; he became known in the media as the Ice Man.

Around this time, John Helgerson, the C.I.A.’s inspector general, sent investigators to Iraq and San Diego to interview witnesses about the agency’s role in Jamadi’s death. These investigators determined that there was the possibility of criminality—the threshold level required by the intelligence agency in order for the case to be referred to the Justice Department. The agency did so, and officials in the Justice Department then forwarded the case to the office of Paul McNulty, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, which has jurisdiction over C.I.A. headquarters. The dossier has been there for more than a year. A lawyer familiar with the case, who asked not to be named, said that the Swanner file seemed to be “lying kind of fallow.”

A spokeswoman for McNulty said that he would have no comment on the case, because it was still under investigation. (Last month, President Bush nominated McNulty to the position of Deputy Attorney General, the second most powerful job in the Justice Department.) No other official in the Justice Department would discuss on the record why, more than two years after Jamadi’s death, no decision has been made about pressing charges against anyone.

A government official familiar with the case, who declined to be named, indicated that establishing guilt in the case might be complicated, because of Jamadi’s rough handling by the SEALs before he entered the custody of the C.I.A. Yet, in the past two years, several of the Navy SEALs who captured Jamadi and delivered him to C.I.A. officials have faced abuse charges in military-justice proceedings, and have been exonerated. Moreover, three medical experts who have examined Jamadi’s case told me that the injuries he sustained from the SEALs could not have caused his death.

Fred Hitz, who served as the C.I.A.’s inspector general from 1990 to 1998, and who is now a lecturer in public and international affairs at Princeton University, said of Bush Administration officials, “I just think they’re playing stall ball.” He told me that he had no inside knowledge of the Swanner case, but he believes that, for numerous reasons, ranging from protecting national security to avoiding political embarrassment, Administration officials “would be opposed to any accountability in this case. They want it to disappear off the screen.” (A spokesman for the C.I.A. said that its internal investigation into Jamadi’s death was “nearly complete,” making it “inappropriate to discuss any of the details.”)

John Radsan, a lawyer formerly in the C.I.A’s Office of General Counsel, says, “Along with the usual problems of dealing with classified information in a criminal case, this could open a can of worms if a C.I.A. official in this case got indicted—a big fat can of worms about what set of rules apply to people like Jamadi. The sixty-four-thousand-dollar question is: What has been authorized? Can the C.I.A. torture people? A case like this opens up Pandora’s box.”

Since September 11, 2001, the C.I.A.’s treatment and interrogation of terrorist suspects has remained almost entirely hidden from public view. Human-rights groups estimate that some ten thousand foreign suspects are being held in U.S. detention facilities in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and other countries. A small but unknown part of this population is in the custody of the C.I.A., which, as Dana Priest reported recently in the Washington Post, has operated secret prisons in Thailand and in Eastern Europe. It is also unclear how seriously the agency deals with allegations of prisoner abuse. The C.I.A. tends to be careful about following strict legal procedures, including the briefing of the top-ranking members of the congressional intelligence committees on its covert activities. But experts could recall no instance of a C.I.A. officer being tried in a public courtroom for manslaughter or murder. Thomas Powers, the author of two books about the C.I.A., told me, “I’ve never heard of anyone at the C.I.A. being convicted of a killing.” He added that a case such as Jamadi’s had awkward political implications. “Is the C.I.A. capable of addressing an illegal killing by its own hands?” he asked. “My guess is not.” Whereas the military has subjected itself to a dozen internal investigations in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, and has punished more than two hundred soldiers for wrongdoing, the agency has undertaken almost no public self-examination.

The C.I.A. has reportedly been implicated in at least four deaths of detainees in Afghanistan and Iraq, including that of Jamadi, and has referred eight potentially criminal cases involving abuse and misconduct to the Justice Department. In March, Goss, the C.I.A.’s director, testified before Congress that “we don’t do torture,” and the agency’s press office issued a release stating, “All approved interrogation techniques, both past and present, are lawful and do not constitute torture. . . . C.I.A. policies on interrogation have always followed legal guidance from the Department of Justice. If an individual violates the policy, then he or she will be held accountable.”

Yet the government has brought charges against only one person affiliated with the agency: David Passaro, a low-level contract employee, not a full-fledged C.I.A. officer. In 2003, Passaro, while interrogating an Afghan prisoner, allegedly beat him with a flashlight so severely that he eventually died from his injuries. In two other incidents of prisoner abuse, the Times reported last month, charges probably will not be brought against C.I.A. personnel: the 2003 case of an Iraqi prisoner who was forced head first into a sleeping bag, then beaten; and the 2002 abuse of an Afghan prisoner who froze to death after being stripped and chained to the floor of a concrete cell. (The C.I.A. supervisor involved in the latter case was subsequently promoted.)

One reason these C.I.A. officials may not be facing charges is that, in recent years, the Justice Department has established a strikingly narrow definition of torture. In August, 2002, the department’s Office of Legal Counsel sent a memo on interrogations to the White House, which argued that a coercive technique was torture only when it induced pain equivalent to what a person experiencing death or organ failure might suffer. By implication, all lesser forms of physical and psychological mistreatment—what critics have called “torture lite”—were legal. The memo also said that torture was illegal only when it could be proved that the interrogator intended to cause the required level of pain. And it provided interrogators with another large exemption: torture might be acceptable if an interrogator was acting in accordance with military “necessity.” A source familiar with the memo’s origins, who declined to speak on the record, said that it “was written as an immunity, a blank check.” In 2004, the “torture memo,” as it became known, was leaked, complicating the nomination of Alberto R. Gonzales to be Attorney General; as White House counsel, Gonzales had approved the memo. The Administration subsequently revised the guidelines, using language that seemed more restrictive. But a little-noticed footnote protected the coercive methods permitted by the “torture memo,” stating that they did not violate the “standards set forth in this memorandum.”

The Bush Administration has resisted disclosing the contents of two Justice Department memos that established a detailed interrogation policy for the Pentagon and the C.I.A. A March, 2003, classified memo was “breathtaking,” the same source said. The document dismissed virtually all national and international laws regulating the treatment of prisoners, including war-crimes and assault statutes, and it was radical in its view that in wartime the President can fight enemies by whatever means he sees fit. According to the memo, Congress has no constitutional right to interfere with the President in his role as Commander-in-Chief, including making laws that limit the ways in which prisoners may be interrogated. Another classified Justice Department memo, issued in August, 2002, is said to authorize numerous “enhanced” interrogation techniques for the C.I.A. These two memos sanction such extreme measures that, even if the agency wanted to discipline or prosecute agents who stray beyond its own comfort level, the legal tools to do so may no longer exist. Like the torture memo, these documents are believed to have been signed by Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, but written by a Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, who is now a professor of law at Berkeley.

For nearly a year, Democratic senators critical of alleged abuses have been demanding to see these memos. “We need to know what was authorized,” Carl Levin, a Democrat from Michigan, told me. “Was it waterboarding? The use of dogs? Stripping detainees? . . . The refusal to give us these documents is totally inexcusable.” Levin is a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which is supposed to have an oversight role in relation to the C.I.A. “The Administration is getting away with just saying no,” he went on. “There’s no claim of executive privilege. There’s no claim of national security—we’ve offered to keep it classified. It’s just bullshit. They just don’t want us to know what they’re doing, or have done.”

By the summer of 2003, the insurgency against the U.S. occupation of Iraq had grown into a confounding and lethal insurrection, and the Pentagon and the White House were pressing C.I.A. agents and members of the Special Forces to get the kind of intelligence needed to crush it. On orders from Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, General Geoffrey Miller, who had overseen coercive interrogations of terrorist suspects at Guantánamo, imposed similar methods at Abu Ghraib. In October of that year, however—a month before Jamadi’s death—the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel issued an opinion stating that Iraqi insurgents were covered by the Geneva Conventions, which require the humane treatment of prisoners and forbid coercive interrogations. The ruling reversed an earlier interpretation, which had concluded, erroneously, that Iraqi insurgents were not protected by international law.

As a result of these contradictory mandates from Washington, the rules of engagement at Abu Ghraib became muddy, and the tactics grew increasingly ad hoc. Jeffrey H. Smith, a former general counsel of the C.I.A., told me, “Abu Ghraib has its roots at the top. I think this uncertainty about who was and who was not covered by the Geneva Conventions, and all this talk that they’re all terrorists, bred the climate in which this kind of abuse takes place.”

At Abu Ghraib, the confusion over interrogation and detention methods was compounded by the fact that C.I.A. officials worked side by side with U.S. military people. Colonel Janis Karpinski, a former commander of the 800th Military Police Brigade, which oversaw the administration of Abu Ghraib during the period of widespread abuse, has said that C.I.A. officers, along with contract interpreters and some military-intelligence officers, did not wear uniforms when they visited the prison, and it was not clear, even to her, what they were doing there. “I thought most of the civilians there were interpreters, but there were some civilians I didn’t know,” she told Seymour Hersh. “I called them disappearing ghosts. . . . They were always bringing in somebody for interrogation, or waiting to collect somebody going out.” C.I.A. officials, unlike members of the Army and the Navy, are not bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibits “cruelty toward, or oppression or maltreatment of” prisoners.

Walter Diaz, a military policeman, was on guard duty at Abu Ghraib the morning that Jamadi was delivered to the prison. He told me, “The O.G.A.”— “other government agencies,” initials commonly used to protect the identity of the C.I.A.—“would bring in people all the time to interview them. We had one wing, Tier One Alpha, reserved for the O.G.A. They’d have maybe twenty people there at a time.” He went on, “They were their prisoners. They’d get into a room and lock it up. We, as soldiers, didn’t get involved. We’d lock the door for them and leave. We didn’t know what they were doing.” But, he recalled, “we heard a lot of screaming.”

Considering this level of secrecy, it’s doubtful that any details would have emerged about the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death had it not been for a strange and tangential chain of events. Three months after Jamadi died, Jeffrey Hopper, a Navy SEAL who had been assigned to carry out joint operations with the C.I.A. in Baghdad, was accused of stealing another SEAL’s body armor. Hopper, who had been nicknamed Klepto by the unit, was expelled from the Special Forces. When he was dismissed, he told authorities that he knew of far worse offenses committed by other SEALs, and he cited the abuse of several prisoners, including Jamadi. His accusations formed the basis of multiple charges against several SEALs, which led to the court-martial of Lieutenant Andrew Ledford, the commander of the platoon that captured Jamadi, for, among other things, allowing his troops to assault the prisoner. Last May, Ledford was acquitted of any wrongdoing; but during the hearings, which were open, a number of troubling facts spilled out, hinting at the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death.

Seth Hettena, an Associated Press reporter based in San Diego, California, attended the hearings. The courtroom testimony, he reported, indicated that Jamadi, before arriving at Abu Ghraib, was interrogated “in a rough manner” by a combination of SEALs and C.I.A. personnel in “the Romper Room,” a tiny space in the Navy camp at Baghdad International Airport. Swanner was among those present. One of the SEALs testified that after Jamadi was handcuffed a C.I.A. interrogator rammed “his arm up against the detainee’s chest, pressing on him with all his weight.” According to a recent report by John McChesney on National Public Radio, a C.I.A. guard who witnessed the scene later told investigators that, after stripping Jamadi and dousing him in cold water, a C.I.A. interrogator threatened to “barbecue” him if he didn’t talk. Jamadi reportedly moaned, “I’m dying, I’m dying.” The interrogator replied, “You’ll be wishing you were dying.”

Court testimony also established that Jamadi was “body-slammed” by the SEALs into the back of a Humvee before being delivered to Abu Ghraib. During this time, he was handcuffed. “Was he a threat?” a Navy prosecutor asked one of the SEALs on trial. “No, ma’am,” the SEAL conceded.

Soon after the Associated Press published Hettena’s Romper Room story, two unidentified officials, evidently from the C.I.A., appeared in the courtroom. From that point on, Hettena told me, the officials, who did not give their names, protested when the testimony touched on matters sensitive to the C.I.A. In many instances, reporters and other members of the public were required to leave the courtroom. On another occasion, an unidentified C.I.A. witness testified from behind a blue curtain. Several areas of questioning by defense lawyers for the SEALs were ruled off limits. When one of the defense lawyers, Matthew Freedus, asked a witness, “What position was Jamadi in when he died?,” the C.I.A. representatives protested, saying that the answer was classified. The same objection was made when a question was asked about the role that water had played in Jamadi’s interrogation.

By late last spring, the SEALs’ reputations had been tarnished by the exposure of their rough treatment of Jamadi, but they were cleared of the gravest abuse charges. The question of who was responsible for Jamadi’s death remained unanswered. Milt Silverman, one of the defense attorneys, told me, “Who killed Jamadi? I know it wasn’t any of the SEALs. . . . That’s why their cases got dismissed.” Frank Spinner, a civilian lawyer who represented Ledford, said, “There’s a stronger case against the C.I.A. than there is against Ledford. But the military’s being hung out to dry while the C.I.A. skates. I want a public accounting, whether in a trial, a hearing before a congressional committee, or a public report. There’s got to be something more meaningful than sticking the case in a Justice Department drawer.”

Spinner and several of the other defense lawyers learned more about the C.I.A.’s role in Jamadi’s death than they were supposed to know, owing to a classification error made by the agency. The C.I.A. sent hundreds of pages of material on Jamadi’s death to the Navy; much of it was classified, and all of it was marked unclassified. The pages were passed on to the civilian lawyers, who read them carefully. The agency, after realizing its mistake, demanded that the lawyers return the classified material, and subsequently sealed virtually all the court records relating to the case. Some of the C.I.A. documents, however, were seen by a source familiar with the case, who shared their contents with me.

Manadel al-Jamadi arrived at Abu Ghraib naked from the waist down, according to an eyewitness, Jason Kenner, an M.P. with the 372nd Military Police Company. In a statement to C.I.A. investigators, Kenner recalled that Jamadi had been stripped of his pants, underpants, socks, and shoes, arriving in only a purple T-shirt and a purple jacket, and with a green plastic sandbag completely covering his head. Nevertheless, Kenner told C.I.A. investigators, “the prisoner did not appear to be in distress. He was walking fine, and his speech was normal.” The plastic “flex cuffs” on Jamadi’s wrists were so tight, however, that Kenner had trouble cutting them off when they were replaced with steel handcuffs and Jamadi’s hands were secured behind his back.

Staff Sergeant Mark Nagy, a reservist in the 372nd Military Police Company, was also on duty at Abu Ghraib when Jamadi arrived. According to the classified internal documents, he told C.I.A. investigators that Jamadi seemed “lucid,” noting that he was “talking during intake.” Nagy said that Jamadi was “not combative” when he was placed in a holding cell, and that he “responded to commands.” In Nagy’s opinion, there was “no need to get physical with him.”

Kenner told the investigators that, “minutes” after Jamadi was placed in the holding cell, an “interrogator”—later identified as Swanner—began “yelling at him, trying to find where some weapons were.” Kenner said that he could see Jamadi through the open door of the holding cell, “in a seated position like a scared child.” The yelling went on, he said, for five or ten minutes. At some point, Kenner said, Swanner and his translator “removed the prisoner’s jacket and shirt,” leaving him naked. He added that he saw no injuries or bruises. Soon afterward, the M.P.s were told by Swanner and the translator to “take the prisoner to Tier One,” the agency’s interrogation wing. The M.P.s dressed Jamadi in a standard-issue orange jumpsuit, keeping the sandbag over his head, and walked him to the shower room there for interrogation. Kenner said that Jamadi put up “no resistance.”

On the way, Nagy noticed that Jamadi was “groaning and breathing heavily, as if he was out of breath.” Walter Diaz, the M.P. who had been on guard duty at the prison, told C.I.A. investigators that Jamadi showed “no distress or complaints on the way to the shower room.” But he told me that he, too, noticed that Jamadi was having “breathing problems.” An autopsy showed that Jamadi had six fractured ribs; it is unclear when they were broken. The C.I.A. officials in charge of Jamadi did not give him even a cursory medical exam, although the Geneva Conventions require that prisoners receive “medical attention.”

“Jamadi was basically a ‘ghost prisoner,’ ” a former investigator on the case, who declined to be named, told me. “He wasn’t checked into the facility. People like this, they just bring ’em in, and use the facility for interrogations. The lower-ranking enlisted guys there just followed the orders from O.G.A. There was no booking process.”

According to Kenner’s testimony, when the group reached the shower room Swanner told the M.P.s that “he did not want the prisoner to sit and he wanted him shackled to the wall.” (No explanation for this decision is recorded.) There was a barred window on one wall. Kenner and Nagy, using a pair of leg shackles, attached Jamadi’s arms, which had been placed behind his back, to the bars on the window.

The Associated Press quoted an expert who described the position in which Jamadi died as a form of torture known as “Palestinian hanging,” in which a prisoner whose hands are secured behind his back is suspended by his arms. (The technique has allegedly been used in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.) The M.P.s’ sworn accounts to investigators suggest that, at least at first, Jamadi was able to stand up, without pain: autopsy records show that he was five feet ten, and, as Diaz explained to me, the window was about five feet off the ground. The accounts concur that, while Jamadi was able to stand without discomfort, he couldn’t kneel or sit without hanging painfully from his arms. Once he was secured, the M.P.s left him alone in the room with Swanner and the translator.

Less than an hour later, Diaz said, he was walking past the shower room when Swanner came out and asked for help, reportedly saying, “This guy doesn’t want to coöperate.” According to the NPR report, one of the C.I.A. men told investigators that he called for medical help, but there is no available record of a doctor having been summoned. When Diaz entered the shower room, he said, he was surprised to see that Jamadi’s knees had buckled, and that he was almost kneeling. Swanner, he said, wanted the soldiers to reposition Jamadi, so that he would have to stand more erectly. Diaz called for additional help from two other soldiers in his company, Sergeant Jeffery Frost and Dennis Stevanus. But after they had succeeded in making Jamadi stand for a moment, as requested, by hitching his handcuffs higher up the window, Jamadi collapsed again. Diaz told me, “At first I was, like, ‘This guy’s drunk.’ He just dropped down to where his hands were, like, coming out of his handcuffs. He looked weird. I was thinking, He’s got to be hurting. All of his weight was on his hands and wrists—it looked like he was about to mess up his sockets.”

Swanner, whom Diaz described as a “kind of shabby-looking, overweight white guy,” who was wearing black clothing, was apparently less concerned. “He was saying, ‘He’s just playing dead,’ ” Diaz recalled. “He thought he was faking. He wasn’t worried at all.” While Jamadi hung from his arms, Diaz told me, Swanner “just kept talking and talking at him. But there was no answer.”

Frost told C.I.A. investigators that the interrogator had said that Jamadi was just “playing possum.” But, as Frost lifted Jamadi upright by his jumpsuit, noticing that it was digging into his crotch, he thought, This prisoner is pretty good at playing possum. When Jamadi’s body went slack again, Frost recalled commenting that he “had never seen anyone’s arms positioned like that, and he was surprised they didn’t just pop out of their sockets.”

Diaz, sensing that something was wrong, lifted Jamadi’s hood. His face was badly bruised. Diaz placed a finger in front of Jamadi’s open eyes, which didn’t move or blink, and deduced that he was dead. When the men lowered Jamadi to the floor, Frost told investigators, “blood came gushing out of his nose and mouth, as if a faucet had been turned on.”

Swanner, who had seemed so unperturbed, suddenly appeared “surprised” and “dumbfounded,” according to Frost. He began talking about how Jamadi had fought and resisted the entire way to the prison. He also made calls on his cell phone. Within minutes, Diaz said, four or five additional O.G.A. officers, also dressed in black, arrived on the scene.

Dr. Steven Miles, a medical ethicist at the University of Minnesota, who is writing a study of U.S. medical practices during the war on terrorism, has examined the Jamadi incident extensively. He recently recounted to me what happened that morning: “An Iraqi medical doctor working with the C.I.A. confirmed Jamadi’s death. Captain Donald Reese, the commander of Abu Ghraib M.P.s, came to the shower room and heard Colonel Thomas M. Pappas, the commander of military intelligence at the prison, say, ‘I am not going down for this alone.’ ”

C.I.A. personnel ordered that Jamadi’s body be kept in the shower room until the next morning. The corpse was packed in ice and bound with tape, apparently in an attempt to slow its decomposition and, Miles believes, to try to alter the perceived time of death. The ice was already melting when Specialist Sabrina Harman posed for pictures while stooping over Jamadi’s body, smiling and giving the thumbs-up sign. The next day, a medic inserted an I.V. in Jamadi’s arm, put the body on a stretcher, and took it out of the prison as if Jamadi were merely ill, so as to “not upset the other detainees.” Other interrogators, Miles said, “were told that Jamadi had died of a heart attack.” (There is no medical evidence that Jamadi experienced heart failure.) A military-intelligence officer later recounted that a local taxi-driver was paid to take away Jamadi’s body.

Before leaving, Frost told investigators, Swanner confided that he “did not get any information out of the prisoner.” C.I.A. officials took with them the bloodied hood that had covered Jamadi’s head; it was later thrown away. “They destroyed evidence, and failed to preserve the scene of the crime,” Spinner, the lawyer for one of the Navy SEALs, said.

The next day, Swanner gave a statement to Army investigators, stressing that he hadn’t laid a hand on Jamadi, and hadn’t done anything wrong. “Clint C.,” the translator, also said that Swanner hadn’t beaten Jamadi. “I don’t think anybody intended the guy to die,” a former investigator on the case, who asked not to be identified, told me. But he believes that the decision to shackle Jamadi to the window reflected an intent to cause suffering. (Under American and international law, intent is central to assessing criminality in war-crimes and torture cases.) The C.I.A., he said, “put him in that position to get him to talk. They took it that pain equals coöperation.”

The autopsy, performed by military pathologists five days later, classified Jamadi’s death as a homicide, saying that the cause of death was “compromised respiration” and “blunt force injuries” to Jamadi’s head and torso. But it appears that the pathologists who performed the autopsy were unaware that Jamadi had been shackled to a high window. When a description of Jamadi’s position was shared with two of the country’s most prominent medical examiners—both of whom volunteered to review the autopsy report free, at the request of a lawyer representing one of the SEALs—their conclusion was different. Miles, independently, concurred.

One of those examiners, Dr. Michael Baden, who is the chief forensic pathologist for the New York State Police, told me, “What struck me was that Jamadi was alive and well when he walked into the prison. The SEALs were accused of causing head injuries before he arrived, but he had no significant head injuries—certainly no brain injuries that would have caused death.” Jamadi’s bruises, he said, were no doubt painful, but they were not life-threatening. Baden went on, “He also had injuries to his ribs. You don’t die from broken ribs. But if he had been hung up in this way and had broken ribs, that’s different.” In his judgment, “asphyxia is what he died from—as in a crucifixion.” Baden, who had inspected a plastic bag of the type that was placed over Jamadi’s head, said that the bag “could have impaired his breath, but he couldn’t have died from that alone.” Of greater concern, he thought, was Jamadi’s position. “If his hands were pulled up five feet—that’s to his neck. That’s pretty tough. That would put a lot of tension on his rib muscles, which are needed for breathing. It’s not only painful—it can hinder the diaphragm from going up and down, and the rib cage from expanding. The muscles tire, and the breathing function is impaired, so there’s less oxygen entering the bloodstream.” A person in such a state would first lose consciousness, he said, and eventually would die. The hood, he suggested, would likely have compounded the problem, because the interrogators “can’t see his face if he’s turning blue. We see a lot about a patient’s condition by looking at his face. By putting that goddam hood on, they can’t see if he’s conscious.” It also “doesn’t permit them to know when he died.” The bottom line, Baden said, is that Jamadi “didn’t die as a result of any injury he got before getting to the prison.”

Dr. Cyril Wecht, a medical doctor and a lawyer who is the coroner of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, and a former president of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences, independently reached the same conclusion. The interpretation put forward by the military pathologists, he said, “didn’t fit with their own report. They said he died of blunt-force trauma, yet there was no significant evidence of trauma to the head.” Instead, Wecht believes that Jamadi “died of compromised respiration,” and that “the position the body was in would have been the cause of death.” He added, “Mind you, I’m not a critic of the Iraq war. But I don’t think we should reduce ourselves to the insurgents’ barbaric levels.”

Walter Diaz told me, “Someone should be charged. If Jamadi was already handcuffed, there was no reason to treat the guy the way they did—the way they hung him.” Diaz said he didn’t know if Swanner had intended to torture Jamadi, or whether the death was accidental. But he was troubled by the government’s inaction, and by what he saw as the agency’s attempt at a coverup. “They tried to blame the SEALs. The C.I.A. had a big role in this. But you know the C.I.A.—who’s going to go against them?”

According to Jeffrey Smith, the former general counsel of the C.I.A., now a private-practice lawyer who handles national-security cases, a decision to prosecute Swanner “would probably go all the way up to the Attorney General.” Critics of the Administration, such as John Sifton, a lawyer for Human Rights Watch, question whether Alberto Gonzales, who became Attorney General last year, has too many conflicts of interest to weigh the case against Swanner fairly. Sifton said, “It’s hard to imagine the current leadership pursuing these guys, because the head of the Justice Department, Alberto Gonzales, is centrally implicated in crafting the policies that led to the abuse.” He suggested that the prudent thing for Gonzales to do would be to “recuse himself from such a decision, and leave it to a deputy, or a career officer.”

But there are political conflicts here, too. It is in the office of Paul McNulty—whose nomination to become Gonzales’s deputy will soon be presented to Congress, and who was a Republican congressional staff member before being named a U.S. Attorney—that the Jamadi case has stalled. And Alice Fisher, the new head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, got that job only under a recess appointment; during her confirmation hearings, Fisher, who previously handled counter-terrorism cases for the department, refused to provide all the information requested about her knowledge of C.I.A. prisoner abuse, and Congress did not approve her nomination.

Even more troubling is the possibility that, under the Bush Administration’s secret interrogation guidelines, the killing of Jamadi might not have broken any laws. Jeffrey Smith says it’s possible that the Office of Legal Counsel’s memos may have opened too many loopholes for interrogators like Swanner, “making prosecution somehow too hard to do.” Smith added, “But, even under the expanded definition of torture, I don’t see how someone beaten with his hands bound, who then died while hanging—how that could be legal. I’d be embarrassed if anyone argued that it was.”

Senator Richard Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, served on the Senate Intelligence Committee until January. Before his tenure ended, he looked at the full, classified set of photographs from Abu Ghraib. In a recent interview at his office in the Capitol, he said, “You can’t imagine what it’s like to go to a closed room where you have a classified briefing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with your colleagues in the Senate, and see hundreds and hundreds of slides like those of Abu Ghraib, most of which have never been publicly disclosed. I had a sick feeling when I left.” He went on, “It was then that I began to have suspicions that something significant was happening at the highest levels of the government when it came to torture policy.”

Since then, Durbin has been trying to close the loopholes that allow government personnel to engage in brutal interrogations. Last year, he introduced an amendment to the defense-authorization bill affirming that the C.I.A. was covered by U.S. laws forbidding torture and the cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment of prisoners. But his effort met intense resistance from the Bush Administration, and the amendment did not pass. Durbin tried other legislative stratagems, without much success. Eventually, John McCain took up Durbin’s cause—which led to last month’s confrontation with Cheney and Goss. The Abu Ghraib scandal seems not to have chastened Cheney or any other Administration officials; in fact, they are for the first time arguing openly and explicitly that C.I.A. personnel should be exempt from standards that apply to every other American.

“I’m concerned that the government isn’t going forward on these prosecutions,” Durbin said of the C.I.A. cases. “It’s really hard to follow the Administration’s policies here. I think the world was very simple before 9/11. We knew what the law was, and I understood it to apply to everyone in the government. Now there’s real uncertainty. There’s a shadow over our nation that needs lifting.”


</td> </tr>

</table>

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"</hr> 

<table border="7" width="100%" id="table1" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" cellspacing="4" cellpadding="4" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#000000">
<tr>
<td width="343">
<img border="0" src="http://gblx.cache.el-mundo.net/fotografia/2004/05/fotosirak/imagenes/01.jpg" width="342" height="454"></td>
<td>
<img bordersize="5" bordercolor="#FF0000"src="http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/images/transcript_headali.jpg" width="193" height="156" align="center">
Haj Ali is the former prisoner who was the man under the black hood in this infamous photo from Abu Ghraib. "Abu Ghraib is a breeding ground for insurgents," says Ali, who describes his experience in detail. "99% of the people brought in are innocent, but with all the insults and torture, it makes them ready to do just about anything." </td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td width="343"> </td>
<td><CENTER>
<EMBED src="http://video.pbs.org:8080/ramgen/media4/now/042905/117detainees-hi.rm" width="330" height="250" controls="all" console="video" autostart="false"></EMBED>
CLICK PLAY</center></td>
</tr>
</table>
 
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"</hr> 
<img border="0" src="http://gblx.cache.el-mundo.net/fotografia/2004/05/fotosirak/imagenes/02.jpg" width="500" height="439">
Iraqi prisoner being threatened by attack dogs. The second & third picture in this series that The New Yorker choose not to publish shows the dogs biting the prisoner and extracting blood. Some dogs were trained to anally rape prisoners. <hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"</hr>

<img border="0" src="http://gblx.cache.el-mundo.net/fotografia/2004/05/fotosirak/imagenes/17.jpg" width="453" height="334">
 
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"</hr>
<img border="0" src="http://gblx.cache.el-mundo.net/fotografia/2005/01/maltrato_prisioneros/img/charcopatada.jpg" width="300" height="193"><img border="0" src="http://image.guardian.co.uk/sys-images/Guardian/Pix/pictures/2005/01/18/courtmartialhandout372.jpg" width="372" height="192">
 A British soldier kicks and beats an Iraqi, immobilized prisoner with a
network that surrounds his body. The spot on the ground is urine.
 <hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"</hr>

 
<img border="0" src="http://gblx.cache.el-mundo.net/fotografia/2005/01/maltrato_prisioneros/img/surf.jpg" width="250" height="355">
British soldier Darren Larkin uses the body of an Iraqi prisoner as a table to surf, simulating to practice this sport, while his companion the soldier
Daniel Kenyon takes a photo of him with his camera 
 
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"</hr>
<img border="0" src="http://www.granma.cu/espanol/2004/irak-horror/imagenes/turturas8.jpg" width="280" height="200">

<img border="0" src="http://gblx.cache.el-mundo.net/fotografia/2005/01/maltrato_prisioneros/img/actopulgar.jpg" width="250" height="294"><img border="0" src="http://gblx.cache.el-mundo.net/fotografia/2005/01/maltrato_prisioneros/img/actosex.jpg" width="300" height="197">
 
<img src="http://gblx.cache.el-mundo.net/fotografia/2004/05/fotosirak/imagenes/03.jpg"> 
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"</hr>
 
<img border="0" src="http://gblx.cache.el-mundo.net/fotografia/2005/01/maltrato_prisioneros/img/aguacara.jpg" width="300" height="196">
Bound Iraqi having his genitals crushed by British soldier 
 
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"</hr>

<img border="0" src="http://www.granma.cu/espanol/2004/irak-horror/imagenes/turtura1.jpg" width="317" height="421"><img border="0" src="http://www.granma.cu/espanol/2004/irak-horror/imagenes/abuso4.jpg" width="243" height="319">
<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="12"</hr>

Makkonnen · Dec 14, 2005

Greed said:
interesting portrayal.

Greed said:
0.13% of people have died in US custody.

i'm fine with that

interesting

Greed · Dec 14, 2005

Greed said:
0.13% of people have died in US custody.

i'm fine with that

dolemite said:
greed and his friends/family...

you love inferring shit dont you.

Greed · Dec 14, 2005

but then again i havent seen the news yet, so you may be right. are my family/friends and me in DoD/CIA custody?

Makkonnen · Dec 14, 2005

Greed said:
but then again i havent seen the news yet, so you may be right. are my family/friends and me in DoD/CIA custody?

we can only hope

hopefully you will soon receive that treatment that is fine in your judgement

Greed · Dec 14, 2005

interesting portrayal

Greed · Mar 26, 2006

US high court judge said to slam detainee rights

US high court judge said to slam detainee rights
By Alister Bull
1 hour, 58 minutes ago

U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia dismissed the idea that Guantanamo detainees have constitutional rights and called European concerns over the issue hypocritical, Newsweek magazine reported on Sunday.

The comments, which Newsweek said were recorded at a private appearance by Scalia in Switzerland on March 8, emerge before a Supreme Court hearing this week on a legal challenge by a Guantanamo prisoner against U.S. military tribunals.

"War is war, and it has never been the case that when you captured a combatant you have to give them a jury trial in your civil courts," Scalia said in the talk at the University of Freiburg, according to Newsweek. "Give me a break."

Court officials were not immediately available for comment.

Ethics experts said the impression that Scalia had already made up his mind before the hearing should mean that he will voluntarily drop out of the proceedings. However, Newsweek said he did not refer specifically to this week's case.

"He should remove himself when there is a reasonable doubt of his impartiality," said Father Robert Drinan, a professor of law at Georgetown University and long-standing human rights campaigner, who teaches judicial ethics.

"It should logically be a reason for his recusal but I don't think he'll do it ... he's so stubborn" said Drinan.

Scalia caused an outcry in 2004 for refusing to recuse himself from an energy policy case involving Vice President Dick Cheney, following the disclosure that they had been on a duck-hunting trip together the year before.

Scalia, asked at Freiburg whether detainees at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have protections under international conventions, gave the suggestion short shrift.

'IT'S CRAZY'

"If he was captured by my army on a battlefield, that is where he belongs. I had a son on that battlefield and they were shooting at my son, and I'm not about to give this man who was captured in a war a full jury trial. I mean it's crazy," he said. Scalia's son Matthew served with the U.S. Army in Iraq.

Newsweek said it had reviewed a recording of the talk.

It said Scalia added that he was "astounded" at "hypocritical" reaction in Europe to the Guantanamo prison.

Lawyers for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, accused of being Osama bin Laden's bodyguard and driver, present oral arguments before the Supreme Court on Tuesday to challenge U.S. President George W. Bush's authority to try prisoners before military tribunals.

Chief Justice John Roberts has recused himself from the hearing because he ruled on the case while he was on a federal appeals court. Scalia has previously recused himself from a case -- one involving the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. flag -- after making public remarks on it.

"A judge has to have an open mind; when he hears the articles and reacts to briefs. If he's made up his mind on a particular issue, he shouldn't be sitting (in)," said Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

"Here he has publicly said that this is what my position is, before the arguments ... It's really stacking the deck," Ratner said. CCR has argued for Guantanamo prisoner rights.

The Hamdan case is considered an important test of the administration's policy in the war on terrorism. The tribunals, formally called military commissions, were authorized by Bush after the September 11 attacks and have been criticized by human rights groups as being fundamentally unfair.

There are about 500 suspected al Qaeda and Taliban prisoners at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

The administration's argument was based on a law signed by Bush on December 30 that limits the ability of Guantanamo prisoners caught in the president's war on terrorism to challenge their detention in federal courts.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060326...dBZ.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--

muckraker10021 · Oct 5, 2006

<img src="http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/globalnav/images/wpcom_logo_feb.gif">


Waterboarding Historically Controversial
In 1947, the U.S. Called It a War Crime; in 1968, It Reportedly Caused an Investigation


by Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 5, 2006; A17
 Key senators say Congress has outlawed one of the most notorious detainee interrogation techniques -- "waterboarding," in which a prisoner feels near drowning. But the White House will not go that far, saying it would be wrong to tell terrorists which practices they might face.
 Inside the CIA, waterboarding is cited as the technique that got Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the prime plotter of the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2006/03/30/LI2006033000769.html" target="">Sept. 11, 2001</a>, terrorist attacks, to begin to talk and provide information -- though "not all of it reliable," a former senior intelligence official said.
 Waterboarding is variously characterized as a powerful tool and a symbol of excess in the nation's fight against terrorists. But just what is waterboarding, and where does it fit in the arsenal of coercive interrogation techniques?
 On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post published a front-page photograph of a U.S. soldier supervising the questioning of a captured North Vietnamese soldier who is being held down as water was poured on his face while his nose and mouth were covered by a cloth. The picture, taken four days earlier near Da Nang, had a caption that said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk."
 The article said the practice was "fairly common" in part because "those who practice it say it combines the advantages of being unpleasant enough to make people talk while still not causing permanent injury."
 The picture reportedly led to an Army investigation.
 Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.
 "Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/k000105/" target="">Sen. Edward M. Kennedy</a> (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said.

<table border="5" width="700" id="table1" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#D5F7FB"><tr><td>
The legislation voted into law today would explicitly permit the use of evidence obtained through waterboarding and other forms of torture. The photos below show one of the actual waterboards used by Pol-Pot's Khymer Rouge regime Here's the first:
<img alt="Waterboard1-small.jpg" src="http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/Waterboard1-small.jpg" height="274" width="366">
 Here's another view:
 <img alt="Waterboard2-small.jpg" src="http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/Waterboard2-small.jpg" height="274" width="366">
How were they used? Here's a painting by a former Khymer Rouge prisoner that shows the waterboard in action:
 <img alt="Waterboard3-small.jpg" src="http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/Waterboard3-small.jpg" height="274" width="366">

According to Cheney-bush-rove-rumsfeld & the WhiteHouse, despite the legislation voted into law today, they reserve the right to use waterboarding as a legitimate practice of interrogation
</td></tr></table>

 A CIA interrogation training manual declassified 12 years ago, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation -- July 1963," outlined a procedure similar to waterboarding. Subjects were suspended in tanks of water wearing blackout masks that allowed for breathing. Within hours, the subjects felt tension and so-called environmental anxiety. "Providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role," the manual states.
 The KUBARK manual was the product of more than a decade of research and testing, refining lessons learned from the Korean War, where U.S. airmen were subjected to a new type of "touchless torture" until they confessed to a bogus plan to use biological weapons against the North Koreans.
 Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presented "basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation." When it comes to torture, however, the handbook advised that "the threat to inflict pain . . . can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."
 In the post-Vietnam period, the Navy SEALs and some Army Special Forces used a form of waterboarding with trainees to prepare them to resist interrogation if captured. The waterboarding proved so successful in breaking their will, says one former Navy captain familiar with the practice, "they stopped using it because it hurt morale."
 After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the interrogation world changed. Low-level Taliban and Arab fighters captured in Afghanistan provided little information, the former intelligence official said. When higher-level al-Qaeda operatives were captured, CIA interrogators sought authority to use more coercive methods.
 These were cleared not only at the White House but also by the Justice Department and briefed to senior congressional officials, according to a statement released last month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Waterboarding was one of the approved techniques.
 When questions began to be raised last year about the handling of high-level detainees and Congress passed legislation barring torture, the handful of CIA interrogators and senior officials who authorized their actions became concerned that they might lose government support.
 Passage last month of military commissions legislation provided retroactive legal protection to those who carried out waterboarding and other coercive interrogation techniques

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"><hr>

<img src="http://harpers.org/art/covers/2006-09_350.jpg">


AMERICAN GULAG
Prisoners' tales from the War on Terror 

by Eliza Griswold

Harper's Magazine
September 2006, Vol. 313, Issue 1876

http://harpers.org/Newsstand200609.html

Every year, the United States government sends Fidel Castro a check for $4,085 to pay the rent on forty-five square miles of Guantánamo Bay real estate. Castro, who has long wanted the U.S. to vacate the premises, refuses to cash the checks. The lease agreement, which dates from 1934, cannot be broken without the consent of both countries, and it is unlikely that ours will ever be given. We have, after all, a network of seven prison camps there, and we've just spent $30 million to open an eighth. The U.S. Supreme Court recently acknowledged, in Hamdan v. Bush, that holding a human being in such a facility, and subjecting him to torture, and denying him even those protections afforded POWs, is in direct violation of Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. Yet there is no indication that this ruling will actually improve the lots of the 450 prisoners held at Guantánamo, let alone the 13,000 people currently "detained" in Iraq, the 500 or so in Afghanistan, and the unknown number (estimated to be about 100) at secret CIA "black sites" around the world. There is no indication that the ruling will at all alter the conditions under which, to date, 98 detainees have died (34 of these deaths are being investigated as homicides) and more than 600 U.S. personnel have been implicated in some form of abuse. President Bush maintained shortly after the decision that the Supreme Court had actually ruled in his favor. "They were silent on whether or not Guantaacute;namo--whether or not we should have used Guantaacute;namo," he said. "In other words, they accepted the use of Guantaacute;namo, the decision I made."

What this means is that for the foreseeable future we will be unable to ascertain what goes on in places like Guantaacute;namo without taking some extraordinary measures. Not even the Red Cross is allowed into the CIA black sites or shipboard brigs, and the organization does not visit the "forward operating bases" where many abuses occur. Red Cross workers are permitted into Guantaacute;namo only on the condition that they not discuss what they see there. Therefore we must turn to the lawyers who attempt, despite intentional and ridiculous obstacles, to provide these prisoners with the representation to which they are entitled under both U.S. and international law. To learn about life at U.S. detention centers, one of these, Tina Monshipour Foster, who as an attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights organized more than 500 pro-bono lawyers to represent the detainees at Guantaacute;namo, recently traveled not to Cuba but to Bahrain, Yemen, and Afghanistan, so that she might speak with some of the few to be released.

I went along.

Last winter, twenty-four-year-old Abdullah al Noaimi returned home from more than four years of prison in Cuba to the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain. Abdullah lives in Bahrain's wealthiest suburb, Riffa, near a Starbucks and across the street from King Hot Dog, where those close to the royal family have homes. One evening, several weeks after he had returned home, Tina and I knocked on the al Noaimis' steel gate. A servant led us past a Nautilus machine and swimming pool to where Abdullah sat in a marble-floored reception room with his mother, his aunt, and two of his sisters. His father works for King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa. His grandmother was a princess. When Abdullah's mother saw Tina, she hugged her and started to cry.

Abdullah was more circumspect. He said it might be okay to tell his story in front of his mother since she didn't speak English. His own English was inflected with the lazy slang of an American college kid. "I lived in Virginia," he explained. "I went to Old Dominion University for two years. I've even been to Disneyland." His thirteen-year-old sister said to him, "I understand you."

There are three kinds of detainees: high-ranking Al Qaeda suspects; men who are not necessarily accused of anything but may have intelligence value; and those, like Abdullah, who were supposedly rounded up on the battlefield, fighting against Coalition troops. Any of these may be designated enemy combatants. Abdullah was accused of traveling to Afghanistan with the intention of fighting jihad, an accusation he denies. Like 95 percent of the detainees at Guantánamo, Abdullah wasn't arrested by Americans. Instead, he was abducted and sold by Pashtun tribesmen to Pakistani security forces. At the time of his arrest, in late 2001, there seemed to be a bounty on every Arab's head, and fliers promising "wealth and power beyond your dreams" were dropping, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "like snowflakes in December in Chicago." The Pakistanis piled Abdullah and others into the back of a truck. "They blindfolded and cuffed us," he said. "I shouted at them, 'You monsters, you don't even know what Islam is.'"

Over the next two weeks, Abdullah was taken to a series of prisons in Pakistan's tribal areas, along the Afghan border, and eventually to a large prison at Kohat. The prison at Kohat and another at Alizai are significant because, according to Human Rights First, both are suspected of being proxy detention centers, where detainees are held by third-party countries--Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and Syria among them--allowing the United States to deny culpability for abuses committed on its behalf. After several weeks there, Abdullah heard that he and other prisoners were going to be handed over to the Americans.

"When I was told I was going to be taken to the Americans, I was relieved. Please, take me to an American prison," he said. Under American justice, he believed, innocent men like him were sure to be released. That was more than four years ago.

"I told everybody that it was good the Americans were taking us." But the Pakistani guards said otherwise: "If you can escape, escape now. You're being taken to Kandahar."

The night before Abdullah was moved, a Pakistani officer snuck into his cell to take digital pictures and obtain phone numbers from prisoners, given the likelihood that the young men were about to disappear. It was only because of this officer's efforts that Abdullah's family learned of his arrest.

During his first interrogation by the Americans, Abdullah realized that things were not as he'd expected. An American man and woman, who were not wearing uniforms, became furious when he told them he'd visited the States numerous times and had even attended Old Dominion. Abdullah told them he was nineteen; they decided he was thirty. He remembers being "tied like a package, covered with a white cloth" on his journey to Afghanistan. "It was very cold and quiet," he said. "There were thirty of us tied together." Half of these men were then taken into a tent and heard the sound of triggers being cocked. "They pulled our legs mad we fell on our faces and they hit us with rifle butts. They walked on us like we were piano keys."

I asked him what happened next.

He laid his head back against the couch. "They cut off my clothes, and men and women were there …" He paused and looked at the floor. "I prefer to skip this part," he said. "I don't want anyone to know what happened to me."

At Guantánamo, Abdullah said, his lack of intelligence value wasn't difficult to discern. "For three years, the interrogators said to me, 'We don't know why you're here. You're going home soon.'"

But at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal--a proceeding at which the accused can neither review the evidence against him nor have a lawyer present--Abdullah was found to be an enemy combatant nonetheless, because, according to the U.S. military, he had "traveled to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban and die in jihad." The evidence in support of this claim remains secret. When eventually it was arranged for him to be released and sent back to Bahrain, he was ordered to sign a paper promising that he would never again be involved with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. He was told that if he didn't sign, he could not go home, The paper also said that he was grateful to America for his release.

"I made so many friends there," he went on. "I wish I could have one more night with my friends in Cuba." Tina and I assumed he was talking about fellow prisoners, but he was referring, oddly, to the guards. "Put it in an American paper: 'Did you know Prisoner 159 at Gitmo?' A lot of people will respond to you."

"The guards are one of the system's victims. Some of them have signed contracts they can't escape." Some of the soldiers came to him with marital problems, and one said he wanted to kill himself for what he'd seen in Cuba. "I told him, 'Remember these cages, the orange jumpsuits, and keep going.'"

Before we left, Abdullah's mother gave us dishes of oud al-Hind, an incense that is said to cure seven diseases, including sore throat and pleurisy. Out of earshot of Abdullah, she suddenly spoke better English. It was clear that she had pretended not to understand in order to hear her son's story. For a year and a half, she told us, she called her son's mobile phone every day hoping that he would answer. After that, "I did nothing but cry."

If and when a lawyer is allowed to apply to visit Guantánamo, the only part of the U.S. detention system where legal representation is even a possibility, he or she must undergo a thorough background check, with neighbors, friends, and even doormen questioned by the FBI. In one instance, FBI agents asked an anxious girlfriend why, after four years, her lawyer boyfriend still hadn't married her.

Upon reaching Guantánamo, lawyers are often told that their clients don't want to see them. Clients have later told their lawyers that they didn't even know anyone had visited. Once their lawyers leave, detainees are frequently interrogated. Interrogators have told detainees that cooperating with a lawyer will keep them in Cuba forever, and that the attorneys who visited Guantánamo are "Jews." At times the interrogators have even posed as lawyers themselves.

Upon leaving Guantánamo, attorneys must submit all their notes to the Department of Defense, which then decides what is classified and what is not. To get these notes back, the attorneys must go to Washington, D.C., and apply in person to have the notes declassified. On one occasion, the government claimed to have lost all the notes from an eighteen-hour interview, forcing the lawyer to go back to Cuba and explain this to a detainee who was already deeply suspicious of the whole process.

"The incredible challenge is having them open up to you in any way," a litigator named Yiota Souras told me. So attorneys will often travel abroad, make contact with their clients' families, take photographs, videos, and collect personal stories only the family would know in an elaborate effort to establish trust. As in: "Look, I've had tea with your brothers, and here we are in the garden," Souras said.

Frequently, though, the attorneys end up being interviewed by families desperate for information about the law and news of their fathers and brothers and sons. In Bahrain one morning I found myself behind the closed wooden doors of a conference room with five Saudi men and three American women, all of them lawyers. The Saudis, conservative Salafists, had traveled for days to meet with the only people to have seen their sons since the young men disappeared nearly four years ago. The meeting took place in Bahrain rather than Saudi Arabia because the Saudi government had not yet granted permission for the American lawyers to enter the country. (Dr. Abdullah Ibrahim el-Kuwaiz, the Saudi ambassador to Bahrain, explained to me later that "in the case of 9/11, fifteen of the nineteen were Saudis. The Saudi government is always being accused of aiding terrorists. It has to clear itself first.")

One of the fathers, Ali Saleh Jrab al Sayari, fifty-three, with clouded blue eyes and a nervous smile, said that for three years he had believed his son to be dead. Then he was called into the office of the Saudi Interior Ministry and handed a note from the Red Cross. This is how many families find out that their missing sons are not dead: they receive a handwritten letter from the Red Cross, which has now delivered more than 20,000 such letters. In his letter, Ali Saleh said, his son's message was unclear and didn't even reveal when or where he'd been arrested, "so much of it had been blacked out." No other word followed.

"Are they chained in their cells?" he asked Jennifer Ching, a thirty-one-year-old corporate litigator. Her head was covered with what looked like a baby blanket trimmed in maroon satin.

"I can only tell you what I have seen," she answered.

The Saudi men nodded and continued with their questions.

"Those who are in an isolated cell, do they eat alone?" Ali Saleh asked.

"Do they pray alone?"

"Is there a toilet in the cell?"

"Do they change their clothes every day?"

Jennifer described how and where men are imprisoned at Guantánamo. Every father was eager to hear if his son was in Camp Four, at that point the communal camp and the only medium-security camp at Guantánamo. Jennifer explained that she met with her clients only in Camp Echo, where they are held in solitary confinement. What she didn't say is that the men there are chained to the floor during meetings and, because of the construction of the new camp, have more reason than ever to tear that they'll be in Cuba forever.

Ali Saleh asked what the men wore in each of these different camps. "It depends," Jennifer said. Generally, the clothing was color-coded: white for the best-behaved, tan for the slightly uncompliant, and the infamous orange for the worst. In the summer of 2005, at the outset of a long hunger strike, the inmates demanded an end to this system, and the color-coding was relaxed--for a while.

The Saudi men went on: "What is your nationality?"

"I'm an American-born Chinese," Jennifer said. The men looked at her blankly.

"What about interrogations?"

"Some men haven't been interrogated in two years," she said. "Others sit in interrogation rooms and say nothing."

"Do they read papers, books?"

"Most of the time just the Koran," she said. Books--like socks or mattresses--are considered comfort items and can be taken away at will. Letters are another luxury, she explained, something that interrogators use against prisoners. Blankets can be withheld, or air-conditioning can be overused to freeze a prisoner into compliance. This, like mock executions, is a "no-touch" torture, two common forms of which are "sensory deprivation" (hooding) and "self-inflicted pain," such as being made to stand with arms outstretched. The combination, Alfred McCoy notes in A Question of Torture, "causes victims to feel responsible for their suffering and thus capitulate more readily to their torturers."

In the one letter from his son, Ali Saleh had learned that the young man is suffering from severe memory toss, which is a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. "He says he can't remember very much," Ali Saleh said. "Is that became of psychological or physical torture?"

Jennifer was quiet for a moment. "It very well may be," she said.

After the Saudi fathers left, Jennifer curled up on a couch. She looked worn-out. She has made five visits to Guantánamo, where she finds the staffs bustling mini-mall (Starbucks, McDonald's, KFC) unsettling. Worse, though, are "all these little concrete cells just hanging around on top of each other waiting to be inserted into prisons." When she saw these, she said, "That's when the finality of what the government is doing struck me. This is not a one-time thing; this is a permanent shift in the way we participate in the world."

Despite everything that is hidden about the practices in Guantánamo Bay, it is still the most transparent piece of the larger mosaic of U.S. detention. And so the U.S. has begun to employ a sort of shell game to hide the more embarrassingly innocent detainees from public scrutiny: we simply send them home to be imprisoned by their own governments. When we arrived in Yemen, Tina asked repeatedly for permission to visit former U.S. detainees now held in Yemeni jails, but the government said no. Nonetheless, one visiting day, Tina and I slipped quietly into Sanaa's central prison in an attempt to meet Karam Khamis Said Khamsan, who was reputedly being held there after two years in Cuba.

Amidst a black sea of abayas, we handed over our passports and were hustled into a caged yard, where women shouted out to husbands and brothers and sons coming up from an underground passageway. Eventually Tina spotted Karam and called to him. He came over and peered through the grate at us, then he began to tell his story. "Every day for three months the soldiers at Kandahar used their fingers in my anus," he said, "and also some kind of tool I could feel." For an Arab man, this matter-of-factness was startling. Four months after being cleared by his review tribunal in Cuba, he was sent back to Yemen, where his case had been under further "review" for the last five months. Frankly, after the things he had admitted to during painful interrogations, he was surprised to have been released from Guantánamo at all. "I would have told them anything they wanted to hear," he said, "I would have said I was Osama bin Laden."

The pathways of secret detention have reportedly led through Thailand, the naval base at Diego Garcia, and even East Africa. Given the criteria essential for total secrecy, the system seems always to be in flux. "The Bush Administration is looking for a place that's beyond the snooping of lawyers and journalists--a small island in the middle of nowhere," Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney for thirty-six detainees at Guantánamo, told me. "It's got to be a place that is under American control, but not by the military, because the military leaks like a sieve. There are only one or two options. Parking a boat at Diego Garcia makes sense, a boat that doesn't belong to the Navy, because they learned early on that since U.S. Navy ships are American territory, habeas applies." There are also reports of two detention centers being built in Israel and a new one in Morocco.

The system of secret detention is linked to the larger network through the CIA rendition flights. After Dana Priest of the Washington Post first broke the story of "extraordinary renditions" in 2002, a series of further investigations uncovered a fleet of more than twenty CIA-owned planes that move detainees from location to location. These flights were supposedly authorized in a 2002 executive memo entitled "The President's Power as Commander in Chief to Transfer Captive Terrorists to the Control and Custody of Foreign Nations."
<div align="left">
<img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10023/gulag1.png" align="left"></div>

About seven months after this memo was issued, a Yemeni man named Abdulsalam al Hila, a prominent businessman and tribal leader to some 10,000 people, flew from Yemen to Egypt on business. On September 26, 2002, he disappeared.

One afternoon Tina and I had lunch at Abdulsalam's home with his three brothers, some community leaders, and a group of American lawyers from southern California. "The Yemeni government has said they want him back, but the government is afraid of America," said a man named Hamoud, who was acting as tribal leader in Abdulsalam's stead, as we sat on the floor around a vinyl cloth. "We are hoping for something good from these American people," Hamoud said, nodding toward the southern Californians. He picked up the top half of a goat skull, its yellow teeth intact, and scooped out spoonfuls of brain for his guests. One of the lawyers, a blonde vegetarian, politely ate rice and carrot sticks; I busied myself taking notes.

When lunch was cleared away, the lawyers reclined on pillows mound the large, airy room as the Yemenis recounted what they knew of their missing brother's journey through the network of U.S. detention. Abdulsalam brokered large-scale construction deals, and several years ago he arranged to help some Egyptian contractors build universities. When the Egyptians stiffed him, he flew to Cairo to sort it out. Within days he was detained by Egyptian intelligence officers. The family's theory was that the cheating businessmen somehow framed their brother. More likely, though, Abdulsalam fits into that second category of detainees: those who are not necessarily suspected of wrongdoing but might have valuable intelligence. As a tribal leader, Abdulsalam had been instrumental in helping Arab Afghan fighters return home after the Yemeni civil war. This association with foreign fighters may have interested the American military, but no one can say for sure.

After several days of interrogation in Cairo, Abdulsalam was loaded into a minibus by the Egyptian intelligence officers and taken to the airport. On the runway a group of ski-masked men waited in front of a private plane. According to flight plans obtained by British journalist Stephen Grey, the day after Abdulsalam disappeared a Gulfstream V, tail-number N379P, left Dulles airport in the early morning, landed in Athens, and then continued on to Cairo, landing the day before the Egyptians handed Abdulsalam over to the hooded soldiers. The soldiers cut off his suit, stripped him naked, and searched him. They dressed him in a blue jumpsuit and blindfolded him. He was loaded onto the plane, where he was waist-cuffed, hooded, and gagged. That night, at 11:01, the CIA plane left Cairo for Kabul. This plane was and is owned by Premiere Executive Transport Services, a CIA front company. Its tail number has since been changed at least three times.

Abdulsalam was imprisoned in Afghanistan for two years, first in a prison the detainees call the "dark prison," because prisoners there are held in total darkness. At the dark prison, Abdulsalam was hung from the wall by chains. As he would eventually explain to his lawyer, "In the prison of darkness, they made up stories, and I said I'll thumbprint anything--just let me sleep and give me clothes. I was naked." One hand was cuffed to the wall at all times, which made it hard to sleep or to use the toilet. "It sounds bizarre at first," his lawyer Marc Falkoff told me. "But look at the leaked interrogation logs. They do weird, surreal things designed to disorient and humiliate the men."

Meanwhile, Abdulsalam's family had no idea where he had gone. The Egyptian Embassy in Yemen said that he'd been sent "on a special plane" to Baku, Azerbaijan. Finally, they received a letter smuggled out of Afghanistan by another prisoner. Abdulsalam wrote that after almost two years in Afghanistan he was taken to the U.$. base at Bagram. In 2002, two Afghan men were killed there after being chained and hung from the ceiling and brutally beaten. According to a coroner's testimony, one of the deceased, a taxi driver named Dilawar, had his legs "pulpified." If he'd lived, both of them would have required amputation. Like many detainees, Abdulsalam prefers not to talk about his time at Bagram, because, he says, the "wounds are too bad."

In September of 2004, Abdulsalam was on one of the very last airlifts from Bagram to Cuba, along with nine other detainees, some of whom had been rendered to third-party countries before transfer to Afghanistan. The June 2004 Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush, which established the detainees' right to habeas corpus, meant that Cuba would no longer be a legal black hole. The number of detainees at Bagram, which no one could claim was U.S. soil, soon swelled from 100 to more than 600. Some prisoners, though, have simply disappeared--most likely into the shadow world of CIA black sites.

In Yemen I met with Zacharia bin al Shibh, elder brother of Ramzi, reportedly one of the 9/11 plotters. "You know what was the biggest surprise for me?" he said. "Seeing his picture on Al Jazeera with his big beard." He pulled a picture from his wallet. The brothers had the same deep-set eyes. His family thought Ramzi worked in a German bank. Apparently, he was roommates with Mohammad Atta and had joined the Hamburg Cell.

"I had no idea he was an extremist," Zacharia said, "and it's too hard to say I believe it now." Ramzi was arrested after a shootout in Karachi in 2002 and was immediately handed over to the U.S. He was reportedly flown to Thailand, but now he has vanished. Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff has said that interrupting Ramzi's interrogation would cause "immediate and irreparable" damage.

"We know American history better than our own," Zacharia said. "Even the Nazis who burned more than half the world were given a fair trial." As he showed me out he asked, under his breath, "Is he alive or dead?"

Toward the end of our trip, Tina and I traveled to Afghanistan so that she could search for family members of the 100 or so Afghans still in Guantánamo. We were hoping as well to speak with former detainees who'd been held in the detention centers closest to the fighting, known as "forward operating bases." The U.S. military has at various times made use of some twenty-five holding facilities in Afghanistan, though there may be more. Along with two translators, Tina and I drove three hours south from Kabul, then climbed a snowy pass and dropped down into the valley town of Gardez to meet Dr. Rafiullah Bidar of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. He'd put out word of our visit in advance so that families who feared their sons were detained in Cuba could come and talk to Tina. Some had traveled for days.
<div align="right">
<img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10023/gulag2.png" align="right"></div>
As we walked up the path to Dr. Bidar's squat stucco office, we passed a group of twenty angry-looking men in gray turbans beneath a stand of eucalyptus trees. I asked our translator who they were, but no one seemed to know. Dr. Bidar's office monitors U.S. detention in three Afghan provinces--Paktia, Paktika, and Khost--where, according to former detainees, there are at least three U.S. prisons, one of which is undisclosed. The commission has documented eighty-five cases of abuse by U.S. soldiers. "Every journalist comes through this office," Dr. Bidar said as we sat on his couch. He handed around a plate of wilted cookies and told a story about a young human-rights worker recently killed in Iraq, and how, just months earlier, she had sat on this very couch saying that she didn't want to go back to Baghdad.

Here, as in Iraq, the closer you get to the fighting the worse things are for the detainees. Detainees aren't supposed to be held near the fighting for more than ten days, but many talk about being held for a month. And because there is no formal system for finding out who is detained in such a place, anyone held there is a virtual ghost. Dr. Bidar has made repeated requests to the U.S. military to be allowed to visit the base near Gardez, as not even the Red Cross has been there, but these requests have been denied.

Tina set up shop in a small cold room, and family members filed in one by one to tell the stories of missing sons and to ask questions. Sitting stiffly in front of a video camera, most looked down and spoke in a monotone as they shared familiarities--a love of computers, the time so-and-so fell out of a window--that might later win a lawyer a detainee's trust. Just next door a counselor named Jamila met with a woman who was about to be given to another family because of a blood feud: one of her relatives had killed a man, and she was intended as payment for the death. Over the past three years, the commission has successfully intervened in a number of such cases. When Jamita learned that I was looking for men who'd been detained in forward operating bases, she put on her coat and said, "There is a family I think you should meet."

We drove to a nearby compound. Jamila disappeared inside for a moment, then reappeared at a green door and beckoned to me. I stepped over a pair of a child's muddy rubber boots and followed her under a piece of lace and into a carpeted receiving room filled with terra-cotta pots of geraniums and zinnias.

We were met by Haji Mohammad, a man of about fifty, who showed us around the house and told us his story. One night in January 2004, as his family slept, a group of American soldiers pounded on the door. The soldiers ordered the fourteen adults and fifteen children living there out into the frozen courtyard while they searched the house. Haji showed me where shots had been fired into the roof. "They broke the locks on all of our trunks," he said. "Maybe they heard I'd gone to Saudi Arabia twenty-five years ago." He said that the Americans took several thousand dollars in cash and a gold clock, as well as a Thuraya satellite phone and a couple of Kalashnikovs. It seemed a large claim to make, but later Dr. Bidar told me that stolen money is a common complaint after raids.

Haji disappeared for a minute behind the lace and returned with a laminated paper and what looked like a thick hospital bracelet with the number BT958 on it and, next to the number, a digital picture of a man in an orange jumpsuit with a shaved head. I didn't recognize the man until Haji pointed to himself. It was his prison tag from Bagram. I peered at the laminated paper and read, "This individual has been determined to pose no threat to the United States Armed Forces or its interests in Afghanistan." During the raid, Haji had been arrested with his young son, Tab My attention was directed to a quiet boy nearby with grease-covered hands. Since the raid, Taj had dropped out of school and was learning to be a mechanic to help support his family.

The soldiers hooded and cuffed the father and son and took them to the detention center at the Gardez forward operating base, a small, dirty jail where prisoners were packed together. "We were fed and allowed to go to the bathroom once every two days," Taj said. "We couldn't lie down to sleep." The men were repeatedly beaten, and they weren't given water to perform ablutions before praying. "I wore a hood for eighteen days," Taj told me. If any soldier had bothered to remove Taj's hood, he would have found beneath it a twelve-year-old child.

Haji was taken to Bagram, where 500 detainees are currently being held in conditions much worse than those in Cuba. There he was kept in "a kind of steel net" for seven months with sixteen other men under bright lights that shone around the clock. If a prisoner tried to cover his face, he was punished by being made to assume and maintain "stress positions." Then, inexplicably, Haji was released, He even got an apology. "The Americans said they were sorry," he grimaced, "and they gave me two dollars to get home."

"They said, 'Because you're innocent, we'll give you this paper.'" He held up the sheet again, which he'd laminated and, like many other former detainees I met, kept with him at all times in case he was stopped again. Because it was in English, he couldn't read it himself, and so he didn't know that the line at the bottom read, This has no bearing on future misconduct.

When we arrived back at the Human Rights Commission, those same gray-turbaned men I had noticed beneath the eucalyptus trees were now lined up outside the door, glowering. I went to ask Dr. Bidar if he had any idea who they were. "They've been waiting all day to speak to you," he said. "They were held at Bagram."

Among those waiting was a man named Najibullah, who said that until his release in May of 2004 he had been repeatedly beaten. He also said that he had been given an injection he believed would cause sterility. He likened the cage he was kept in to an animal kennel. For days he received no food. He was short-shackled and forced to squat between three soldiers and two Afghan translators. "They kicked me around like a football," he said.

The next man to enter the room said that before giving information about Bagram he wanted to tell a joke. "You know those monkeys who are forced to dance in the bazaar?" he asked. "Afghans are those monkeys. First the Soviets, then the Pakistanis, and now America forces us to dance." Lately, he said, he'd been trotted out to meet every human-rights delegation and journalist who came through Gardez. "How is telling you this story going to help me?" he asked. He pulled out the same laminated letter that Haji Mohammad had shown me, then left.

Dr. Bidar was somewhat embarrassed. "It was the Afghans themselves who pointed one another out to the Americans," he said. Now they wanted justice from the Americans in the form of reparations none would ever receive, even those whose businesses had been destroyed and whose homes had been looted. An increasing rage, as well as the lack of security in the villages, was making these men perfect fodder for the resurgent Taliban. Just the day before, in Kandahar, a suicide bomber had attacked the police headquarters, killing thirteen people. Even as we returned to the relative safety of Kabul, there were rumors that more suicide bombers were expected. A couple of attempted kidnappings made it unwise to stroll about the town.

In Kabul the lawyers among us continued their efforts to track down their clients' families. Because of the security situation, they couldn't travel outside of the capital, so Tina and her cohorts depended on a local network of detainee families to spread the word about free legal aid for those in Guantánamo. Sadly, most families made the trip because they had loved ones in Bagram, only to discover that there was nothing the lawyers could do: so far it has been next to impossible to prove that U.S. law applies them. One afternoon, as the lawyers sat in the canteen at their guesthouse, a Talib arrived on crutches from Kandahar. Terrified and angry, he didn't look like the other tribesmen and had trouble convincing the guard at the guesthouse to let him in. The Talib refused to give his name. He said that he wanted help in freeing his brother from Bagram. He said that a Bagram guard had used a cell phone to take a photograph of his brother's pulverized face, and that if no one would help him he was considering becoming a suicide bomber.

Although about 100 Afghans are still being detained in Guantánamo, some of the more high-profile detainees have begun to return home. It isn't easy to return in the middle of an ongoing war, and some have become the unlikely spokesmen for civil liberties. One of these is Abdul Salam Zaeef, who formerly served as the Taliban ambassador to Islamabad. He is currently under house arrest with his two wives and eight children in a muddy and new section of Kabul. Zaeef spent the past three years in Cuba and then was suddenly released last September just in time for Afghanistan's elections, a political move he says was designed to appease the Afghan people and convince them to support the American-backed Karzai government.

Zaeef's journey through U.S. detention is unusual in that he was held aboard a ship. The Department of Defense claims that it does not keep detainees on Navy vessels, but, according to Human Rights First, at least two ships, the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu, have been used as brigs. Zaeef spent a week aboard the ship, then was taken to Bagram. "Bagram was the worst kind of mistreatment," he told us. "The first night, the soldiers broke my shoulder, took off all of my clothes, and threw me out into the snow." After several hours, he lost consciousness. "I was sure they were going to kill me," he said, "so I wanted them to do it more quickly."

Once he arrived in Cuba, Zaeef served as an ambassador of sorts between the Afghan detainees and the U.S. military. He counted out the seven hunger strikes on his fingers. "We asked them to give us our rights according to the Geneva Conventions," he said. (Lawyers had sent copies of the Geneva Conventions, in Arabic, to Guantánamo.) Zaeef then met directly with Colonel Mike Bumgardner, who oversaw interrogations at the time, and was told that Secretary Rumsfeld had agreed to some of the demands. Along with five other chosen leaders among the detainees, Zaeef was granted permission to meet detainees to convince them to eat, but the promised changes at the camp never materialized. All six of the chosen leaders were taken to solitary confinement in Camp Echo. Five clays later, Zaeef was sent back to Afghanistan. Before he was flown home, Zaeef was presented with a paper similar to the one given to Abdullah from Bahrain. "It said, number one, the detainee confesses to his crime; number two, the detainee asks for forgiveness; number three, the detainee won't engage in terrorist acts again, which is an admission of guilt; number four, the detainee won't have any links with Al Qaeda; number five, the detainee is thankful to the United States for releasing him."

"I was told if I wouldn't sign the paper, I wouldn't be released." He didn't care. "You made me sit here for three years. You can make me sit here for my entire life, but I'm not a criminal and I won't sign it." Finally, after several hours of this, the soldier across from him gave up and said, "Okay, you write something." So Zaeef took the paper and wrote, "I was kept here for three years and I am not a criminal."

"The American interrogators told me to be cautious about you," Zaeef said, teasingly. "They said not to give you permission to be my lawyers. I'd be in trouble forever and the case would never go away." He smiled. "The interrogators said that lawyers are bad people and that they're always after bad things."

Another former Talib, Mohammed Ibrahim Sahadat, is now one of Afghanistan's leading defense lawyers. He finds the job overwhelming. On one of our last days in Afghanistan, Ibrahim rook Tina and me to visit Policharki Prison, where the United Nations is now helping to revamp the block that will house former detainees from Guantánamo Bay. With white turrets and a sullen concrete needle that serves as a watchtower, Policharki looks as if it is made of Soviet-style Legos. Built in the 1970s, and expanded during the Soviet occupation, Policharki was the site of frequent executions for more than twenty years. According to CNN, some 70,000 bodies are buried in mass graves in the surrounding plains. Today, Policharki houses about 2,000 prisoners, including the Afghan Christian convert recently tried for his faith and three Americans who ran a private prison in Kabul and were convicted of torture. The prison also holds hundreds of former Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Two weeks before our visit, Ibrahim told us, seven Talibs had broken out of the prison. The men had escaped with their families during visiting hours. One of them had been a client of his, he said a bit sheepishly. After the escape, eleven guards had been arrested, and even the warden was under investigation. As a result of the prison break, the detainees were going to be forced to wear uniforms for the first time.

The day we visited was sunny and bright, turning the recent snow to mush. As we waited around a wood stove for permission to visit the new cellblock, a grumbly Tajik guard from the Panjshir Valley--the new face of the law in Afghanistan--eyed us from across the room. He did not offer us tea.

"If I were the warden," he said, "I wouldn't let you in here." Later, as he grudgingly led us toward the new block, he spoke up again and said, "This is the worst war ever."

As we tromped through a muddy field behind the prison, a man appeared from a shiny white United Nations trailer. His name was Sohail Sahibi, and he was an engineer. He was overseeing the work on the Guantánamo block on behalf of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). He looked at us strangely. Here we were: a former Talib, a huge red-haired Pashtun, a Persian-looking woman with a video camera, and an amoebic American scrawling notes. He was friendly enough, though, and he led us through the large half-built cells and pointed out where new bathrooms would be installed and where, in the center, the prisoners would be able to exercise.

There wasn't much to see there--just four old cement bankers that looked a lot like a dilapidated U.S. prison. And as Sahibi led us through the old cells, he seemed to grow increasingly suspicious. He asked us again who we were. When finally he understood that Tina was one of the American lawyers attempting to free Afghans at Guantánamo, he broke into a sudden smile. "Come back to the trailer," he said. "Have tea with me."

As we sat in the U.N. trailer, on brand-new office chairs still covered in plastic, he served us tea and stale chocolates, and said, "My uncle has been in the U.S. prison at Bagram for two months." He said that his uncle, a shepherd named Saqi Jan, had wanted to build a bridge over the river between his village and the next so that his sheep could cross the water to graze. The neighboring village didn't want more livestock traffic, so they reported the old man to the Americans as a member of Al Qaeda. Outside, workers poured the foundation for the new prison. Over the sound of the cement mixer's engine, Sahibi asked if Tina could help get his uncle out of detention. "He's an innocent old man," he said. "Can you help get him free?"

Three weeks after our tea, a riot broke out in Policharki when some of the 350 Al Qaeda and Taliban inmates seized control of their block for several days. Smoke poured out of windows as the inmates set fire to whatever they could find. One of the three Americans convicted of torturing people in a private prison got caught up in the rioting. Frantic, he called the Associated Press from inside the prison on a contraband cell phone: "They said they are going to chop off my head." The prisoners chanted "Death to America" and dropped notes about their mistreatment through the bars. Apparently the protest began when several "high-value" inmates refused to accept the new dress code.

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"><hr>

muckraker10021 · Oct 5, 2006

<img src="http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/globalnav/images/wpcom_logo_feb.gif">


Waterboarding Historically Controversial
In 1947, the U.S. Called It a War Crime; in 1968, It Reportedly Caused an Investigation


by Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, October 5, 2006; A17
 Key senators say Congress has outlawed one of the most notorious detainee interrogation techniques -- "waterboarding," in which a prisoner feels near drowning. But the White House will not go that far, saying it would be wrong to tell terrorists which practices they might face.
 Inside the CIA, waterboarding is cited as the technique that got Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the prime plotter of the <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2006/03/30/LI2006033000769.html" target="">Sept. 11, 2001</a>, terrorist attacks, to begin to talk and provide information -- though "not all of it reliable," a former senior intelligence official said.
 Waterboarding is variously characterized as a powerful tool and a symbol of excess in the nation's fight against terrorists. But just what is waterboarding, and where does it fit in the arsenal of coercive interrogation techniques?
 On Jan. 21, 1968, The Washington Post published a front-page photograph of a U.S. soldier supervising the questioning of a captured North Vietnamese soldier who is being held down as water was poured on his face while his nose and mouth were covered by a cloth. The picture, taken four days earlier near Da Nang, had a caption that said the technique induced "a flooding sense of suffocation and drowning, meant to make him talk."
 The article said the practice was "fairly common" in part because "those who practice it say it combines the advantages of being unpleasant enough to make people talk while still not causing permanent injury."
 The picture reportedly led to an Army investigation.
 Twenty-one years earlier, in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, Yukio Asano, with war crimes for carrying out another form of waterboarding on a U.S. civilian. The subject was strapped on a stretcher that was tilted so that his feet were in the air and head near the floor, and small amounts of water were poured over his face, leaving him gasping for air until he agreed to talk.
 "Asano was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor," <a href="http://projects.washingtonpost.com/congress/members/k000105/" target="">Sen. Edward M. Kennedy</a> (D-Mass.) told his colleagues last Thursday during the debate on military commissions legislation. "We punished people with 15 years of hard labor when waterboarding was used against Americans in World War II," he said.

<table border="5" width="700" id="table1" cellspacing="3" cellpadding="3" bordercolorlight="#FF0000" bordercolordark="#FF0000" bgcolor="#D5F7FB"><tr><td>
The legislation voted into law today would explicitly permit the use of evidence obtained through waterboarding and other forms of torture. The photos below show one of the actual waterboards used by Pol-Pot's Khymer Rouge regime Here's the first:
<img alt="Waterboard1-small.jpg" src="http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/Waterboard1-small.jpg" height="274" width="366">
 Here's another view:
 <img alt="Waterboard2-small.jpg" src="http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/Waterboard2-small.jpg" height="274" width="366">
How were they used? Here's a painting by a former Khymer Rouge prisoner that shows the waterboard in action:
 <img alt="Waterboard3-small.jpg" src="http://www.davidcorn.com/archives/Waterboard3-small.jpg" height="274" width="366">

According to Cheney-bush-rove-rumsfeld & the WhiteHouse, despite the legislation voted into law today, they reserve the right to use waterboarding as a legitimate practice of interrogation
</td></tr></table>

 A CIA interrogation training manual declassified 12 years ago, "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation -- July 1963," outlined a procedure similar to waterboarding. Subjects were suspended in tanks of water wearing blackout masks that allowed for breathing. Within hours, the subjects felt tension and so-called environmental anxiety. "Providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role," the manual states.
 The KUBARK manual was the product of more than a decade of research and testing, refining lessons learned from the Korean War, where U.S. airmen were subjected to a new type of "touchless torture" until they confessed to a bogus plan to use biological weapons against the North Koreans.
 Used to train new interrogators, the handbook presented "basic information about coercive techniques available for use in the interrogation situation." When it comes to torture, however, the handbook advised that "the threat to inflict pain . . . can trigger fears more damaging than the immediate sensation of pain."
 In the post-Vietnam period, the Navy SEALs and some Army Special Forces used a form of waterboarding with trainees to prepare them to resist interrogation if captured. The waterboarding proved so successful in breaking their will, says one former Navy captain familiar with the practice, "they stopped using it because it hurt morale."
 After the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, the interrogation world changed. Low-level Taliban and Arab fighters captured in Afghanistan provided little information, the former intelligence official said. When higher-level al-Qaeda operatives were captured, CIA interrogators sought authority to use more coercive methods.
 These were cleared not only at the White House but also by the Justice Department and briefed to senior congressional officials, according to a statement released last month by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Waterboarding was one of the approved techniques.
 When questions began to be raised last year about the handling of high-level detainees and Congress passed legislation barring torture, the handful of CIA interrogators and senior officials who authorized their actions became concerned that they might lose government support.
 Passage last month of military commissions legislation provided retroactive legal protection to those who carried out waterboarding and other coercive interrogation techniques

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"><hr>

<img src="http://harpers.org/art/covers/2006-09_350.jpg">


AMERICAN GULAG
Prisoners' tales from the War on Terror 

by Eliza Griswold

Harper's Magazine
September 2006, Vol. 313, Issue 1876

http://harpers.org/Newsstand200609.html

Every year, the United States government sends Fidel Castro a check for $4,085 to pay the rent on forty-five square miles of Guantánamo Bay real estate. Castro, who has long wanted the U.S. to vacate the premises, refuses to cash the checks. The lease agreement, which dates from 1934, cannot be broken without the consent of both countries, and it is unlikely that ours will ever be given. We have, after all, a network of seven prison camps there, and we've just spent $30 million to open an eighth. The U.S. Supreme Court recently acknowledged, in Hamdan v. Bush, that holding a human being in such a facility, and subjecting him to torture, and denying him even those protections afforded POWs, is in direct violation of Article Three of the Geneva Conventions. Yet there is no indication that this ruling will actually improve the lots of the 450 prisoners held at Guantánamo, let alone the 13,000 people currently "detained" in Iraq, the 500 or so in Afghanistan, and the unknown number (estimated to be about 100) at secret CIA "black sites" around the world. There is no indication that the ruling will at all alter the conditions under which, to date, 98 detainees have died (34 of these deaths are being investigated as homicides) and more than 600 U.S. personnel have been implicated in some form of abuse. President Bush maintained shortly after the decision that the Supreme Court had actually ruled in his favor. "They were silent on whether or not Guantaacute;namo--whether or not we should have used Guantaacute;namo," he said. "In other words, they accepted the use of Guantaacute;namo, the decision I made."

What this means is that for the foreseeable future we will be unable to ascertain what goes on in places like Guantaacute;namo without taking some extraordinary measures. Not even the Red Cross is allowed into the CIA black sites or shipboard brigs, and the organization does not visit the "forward operating bases" where many abuses occur. Red Cross workers are permitted into Guantaacute;namo only on the condition that they not discuss what they see there. Therefore we must turn to the lawyers who attempt, despite intentional and ridiculous obstacles, to provide these prisoners with the representation to which they are entitled under both U.S. and international law. To learn about life at U.S. detention centers, one of these, Tina Monshipour Foster, who as an attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights organized more than 500 pro-bono lawyers to represent the detainees at Guantaacute;namo, recently traveled not to Cuba but to Bahrain, Yemen, and Afghanistan, so that she might speak with some of the few to be released.

I went along.

Last winter, twenty-four-year-old Abdullah al Noaimi returned home from more than four years of prison in Cuba to the tiny island kingdom of Bahrain. Abdullah lives in Bahrain's wealthiest suburb, Riffa, near a Starbucks and across the street from King Hot Dog, where those close to the royal family have homes. One evening, several weeks after he had returned home, Tina and I knocked on the al Noaimis' steel gate. A servant led us past a Nautilus machine and swimming pool to where Abdullah sat in a marble-floored reception room with his mother, his aunt, and two of his sisters. His father works for King Hamad bin Isa al Khalifa. His grandmother was a princess. When Abdullah's mother saw Tina, she hugged her and started to cry.

Abdullah was more circumspect. He said it might be okay to tell his story in front of his mother since she didn't speak English. His own English was inflected with the lazy slang of an American college kid. "I lived in Virginia," he explained. "I went to Old Dominion University for two years. I've even been to Disneyland." His thirteen-year-old sister said to him, "I understand you."

There are three kinds of detainees: high-ranking Al Qaeda suspects; men who are not necessarily accused of anything but may have intelligence value; and those, like Abdullah, who were supposedly rounded up on the battlefield, fighting against Coalition troops. Any of these may be designated enemy combatants. Abdullah was accused of traveling to Afghanistan with the intention of fighting jihad, an accusation he denies. Like 95 percent of the detainees at Guantánamo, Abdullah wasn't arrested by Americans. Instead, he was abducted and sold by Pashtun tribesmen to Pakistani security forces. At the time of his arrest, in late 2001, there seemed to be a bounty on every Arab's head, and fliers promising "wealth and power beyond your dreams" were dropping, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, "like snowflakes in December in Chicago." The Pakistanis piled Abdullah and others into the back of a truck. "They blindfolded and cuffed us," he said. "I shouted at them, 'You monsters, you don't even know what Islam is.'"

Over the next two weeks, Abdullah was taken to a series of prisons in Pakistan's tribal areas, along the Afghan border, and eventually to a large prison at Kohat. The prison at Kohat and another at Alizai are significant because, according to Human Rights First, both are suspected of being proxy detention centers, where detainees are held by third-party countries--Jordan, Egypt, Morocco, and Syria among them--allowing the United States to deny culpability for abuses committed on its behalf. After several weeks there, Abdullah heard that he and other prisoners were going to be handed over to the Americans.

"When I was told I was going to be taken to the Americans, I was relieved. Please, take me to an American prison," he said. Under American justice, he believed, innocent men like him were sure to be released. That was more than four years ago.

"I told everybody that it was good the Americans were taking us." But the Pakistani guards said otherwise: "If you can escape, escape now. You're being taken to Kandahar."

The night before Abdullah was moved, a Pakistani officer snuck into his cell to take digital pictures and obtain phone numbers from prisoners, given the likelihood that the young men were about to disappear. It was only because of this officer's efforts that Abdullah's family learned of his arrest.

During his first interrogation by the Americans, Abdullah realized that things were not as he'd expected. An American man and woman, who were not wearing uniforms, became furious when he told them he'd visited the States numerous times and had even attended Old Dominion. Abdullah told them he was nineteen; they decided he was thirty. He remembers being "tied like a package, covered with a white cloth" on his journey to Afghanistan. "It was very cold and quiet," he said. "There were thirty of us tied together." Half of these men were then taken into a tent and heard the sound of triggers being cocked. "They pulled our legs mad we fell on our faces and they hit us with rifle butts. They walked on us like we were piano keys."

I asked him what happened next.

He laid his head back against the couch. "They cut off my clothes, and men and women were there …" He paused and looked at the floor. "I prefer to skip this part," he said. "I don't want anyone to know what happened to me."

At Guantánamo, Abdullah said, his lack of intelligence value wasn't difficult to discern. "For three years, the interrogators said to me, 'We don't know why you're here. You're going home soon.'"

But at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal--a proceeding at which the accused can neither review the evidence against him nor have a lawyer present--Abdullah was found to be an enemy combatant nonetheless, because, according to the U.S. military, he had "traveled to Afghanistan to fight for the Taliban and die in jihad." The evidence in support of this claim remains secret. When eventually it was arranged for him to be released and sent back to Bahrain, he was ordered to sign a paper promising that he would never again be involved with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. He was told that if he didn't sign, he could not go home, The paper also said that he was grateful to America for his release.

"I made so many friends there," he went on. "I wish I could have one more night with my friends in Cuba." Tina and I assumed he was talking about fellow prisoners, but he was referring, oddly, to the guards. "Put it in an American paper: 'Did you know Prisoner 159 at Gitmo?' A lot of people will respond to you."

"The guards are one of the system's victims. Some of them have signed contracts they can't escape." Some of the soldiers came to him with marital problems, and one said he wanted to kill himself for what he'd seen in Cuba. "I told him, 'Remember these cages, the orange jumpsuits, and keep going.'"

Before we left, Abdullah's mother gave us dishes of oud al-Hind, an incense that is said to cure seven diseases, including sore throat and pleurisy. Out of earshot of Abdullah, she suddenly spoke better English. It was clear that she had pretended not to understand in order to hear her son's story. For a year and a half, she told us, she called her son's mobile phone every day hoping that he would answer. After that, "I did nothing but cry."

If and when a lawyer is allowed to apply to visit Guantánamo, the only part of the U.S. detention system where legal representation is even a possibility, he or she must undergo a thorough background check, with neighbors, friends, and even doormen questioned by the FBI. In one instance, FBI agents asked an anxious girlfriend why, after four years, her lawyer boyfriend still hadn't married her.

Upon reaching Guantánamo, lawyers are often told that their clients don't want to see them. Clients have later told their lawyers that they didn't even know anyone had visited. Once their lawyers leave, detainees are frequently interrogated. Interrogators have told detainees that cooperating with a lawyer will keep them in Cuba forever, and that the attorneys who visited Guantánamo are "Jews." At times the interrogators have even posed as lawyers themselves.

Upon leaving Guantánamo, attorneys must submit all their notes to the Department of Defense, which then decides what is classified and what is not. To get these notes back, the attorneys must go to Washington, D.C., and apply in person to have the notes declassified. On one occasion, the government claimed to have lost all the notes from an eighteen-hour interview, forcing the lawyer to go back to Cuba and explain this to a detainee who was already deeply suspicious of the whole process.

"The incredible challenge is having them open up to you in any way," a litigator named Yiota Souras told me. So attorneys will often travel abroad, make contact with their clients' families, take photographs, videos, and collect personal stories only the family would know in an elaborate effort to establish trust. As in: "Look, I've had tea with your brothers, and here we are in the garden," Souras said.

Frequently, though, the attorneys end up being interviewed by families desperate for information about the law and news of their fathers and brothers and sons. In Bahrain one morning I found myself behind the closed wooden doors of a conference room with five Saudi men and three American women, all of them lawyers. The Saudis, conservative Salafists, had traveled for days to meet with the only people to have seen their sons since the young men disappeared nearly four years ago. The meeting took place in Bahrain rather than Saudi Arabia because the Saudi government had not yet granted permission for the American lawyers to enter the country. (Dr. Abdullah Ibrahim el-Kuwaiz, the Saudi ambassador to Bahrain, explained to me later that "in the case of 9/11, fifteen of the nineteen were Saudis. The Saudi government is always being accused of aiding terrorists. It has to clear itself first.")

One of the fathers, Ali Saleh Jrab al Sayari, fifty-three, with clouded blue eyes and a nervous smile, said that for three years he had believed his son to be dead. Then he was called into the office of the Saudi Interior Ministry and handed a note from the Red Cross. This is how many families find out that their missing sons are not dead: they receive a handwritten letter from the Red Cross, which has now delivered more than 20,000 such letters. In his letter, Ali Saleh said, his son's message was unclear and didn't even reveal when or where he'd been arrested, "so much of it had been blacked out." No other word followed.

"Are they chained in their cells?" he asked Jennifer Ching, a thirty-one-year-old corporate litigator. Her head was covered with what looked like a baby blanket trimmed in maroon satin.

"I can only tell you what I have seen," she answered.

The Saudi men nodded and continued with their questions.

"Those who are in an isolated cell, do they eat alone?" Ali Saleh asked.

"Do they pray alone?"

"Is there a toilet in the cell?"

"Do they change their clothes every day?"

Jennifer described how and where men are imprisoned at Guantánamo. Every father was eager to hear if his son was in Camp Four, at that point the communal camp and the only medium-security camp at Guantánamo. Jennifer explained that she met with her clients only in Camp Echo, where they are held in solitary confinement. What she didn't say is that the men there are chained to the floor during meetings and, because of the construction of the new camp, have more reason than ever to tear that they'll be in Cuba forever.

Ali Saleh asked what the men wore in each of these different camps. "It depends," Jennifer said. Generally, the clothing was color-coded: white for the best-behaved, tan for the slightly uncompliant, and the infamous orange for the worst. In the summer of 2005, at the outset of a long hunger strike, the inmates demanded an end to this system, and the color-coding was relaxed--for a while.

The Saudi men went on: "What is your nationality?"

"I'm an American-born Chinese," Jennifer said. The men looked at her blankly.

"What about interrogations?"

"Some men haven't been interrogated in two years," she said. "Others sit in interrogation rooms and say nothing."

"Do they read papers, books?"

"Most of the time just the Koran," she said. Books--like socks or mattresses--are considered comfort items and can be taken away at will. Letters are another luxury, she explained, something that interrogators use against prisoners. Blankets can be withheld, or air-conditioning can be overused to freeze a prisoner into compliance. This, like mock executions, is a "no-touch" torture, two common forms of which are "sensory deprivation" (hooding) and "self-inflicted pain," such as being made to stand with arms outstretched. The combination, Alfred McCoy notes in A Question of Torture, "causes victims to feel responsible for their suffering and thus capitulate more readily to their torturers."

In the one letter from his son, Ali Saleh had learned that the young man is suffering from severe memory toss, which is a common symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder. "He says he can't remember very much," Ali Saleh said. "Is that became of psychological or physical torture?"

Jennifer was quiet for a moment. "It very well may be," she said.

After the Saudi fathers left, Jennifer curled up on a couch. She looked worn-out. She has made five visits to Guantánamo, where she finds the staffs bustling mini-mall (Starbucks, McDonald's, KFC) unsettling. Worse, though, are "all these little concrete cells just hanging around on top of each other waiting to be inserted into prisons." When she saw these, she said, "That's when the finality of what the government is doing struck me. This is not a one-time thing; this is a permanent shift in the way we participate in the world."

Despite everything that is hidden about the practices in Guantánamo Bay, it is still the most transparent piece of the larger mosaic of U.S. detention. And so the U.S. has begun to employ a sort of shell game to hide the more embarrassingly innocent detainees from public scrutiny: we simply send them home to be imprisoned by their own governments. When we arrived in Yemen, Tina asked repeatedly for permission to visit former U.S. detainees now held in Yemeni jails, but the government said no. Nonetheless, one visiting day, Tina and I slipped quietly into Sanaa's central prison in an attempt to meet Karam Khamis Said Khamsan, who was reputedly being held there after two years in Cuba.

Amidst a black sea of abayas, we handed over our passports and were hustled into a caged yard, where women shouted out to husbands and brothers and sons coming up from an underground passageway. Eventually Tina spotted Karam and called to him. He came over and peered through the grate at us, then he began to tell his story. "Every day for three months the soldiers at Kandahar used their fingers in my anus," he said, "and also some kind of tool I could feel." For an Arab man, this matter-of-factness was startling. Four months after being cleared by his review tribunal in Cuba, he was sent back to Yemen, where his case had been under further "review" for the last five months. Frankly, after the things he had admitted to during painful interrogations, he was surprised to have been released from Guantánamo at all. "I would have told them anything they wanted to hear," he said, "I would have said I was Osama bin Laden."

The pathways of secret detention have reportedly led through Thailand, the naval base at Diego Garcia, and even East Africa. Given the criteria essential for total secrecy, the system seems always to be in flux. "The Bush Administration is looking for a place that's beyond the snooping of lawyers and journalists--a small island in the middle of nowhere," Clive Stafford Smith, an attorney for thirty-six detainees at Guantánamo, told me. "It's got to be a place that is under American control, but not by the military, because the military leaks like a sieve. There are only one or two options. Parking a boat at Diego Garcia makes sense, a boat that doesn't belong to the Navy, because they learned early on that since U.S. Navy ships are American territory, habeas applies." There are also reports of two detention centers being built in Israel and a new one in Morocco.

The system of secret detention is linked to the larger network through the CIA rendition flights. After Dana Priest of the Washington Post first broke the story of "extraordinary renditions" in 2002, a series of further investigations uncovered a fleet of more than twenty CIA-owned planes that move detainees from location to location. These flights were supposedly authorized in a 2002 executive memo entitled "The President's Power as Commander in Chief to Transfer Captive Terrorists to the Control and Custody of Foreign Nations."
<div align="left">
<img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10023/gulag1.png" align="left"></div>

About seven months after this memo was issued, a Yemeni man named Abdulsalam al Hila, a prominent businessman and tribal leader to some 10,000 people, flew from Yemen to Egypt on business. On September 26, 2002, he disappeared.

One afternoon Tina and I had lunch at Abdulsalam's home with his three brothers, some community leaders, and a group of American lawyers from southern California. "The Yemeni government has said they want him back, but the government is afraid of America," said a man named Hamoud, who was acting as tribal leader in Abdulsalam's stead, as we sat on the floor around a vinyl cloth. "We are hoping for something good from these American people," Hamoud said, nodding toward the southern Californians. He picked up the top half of a goat skull, its yellow teeth intact, and scooped out spoonfuls of brain for his guests. One of the lawyers, a blonde vegetarian, politely ate rice and carrot sticks; I busied myself taking notes.

When lunch was cleared away, the lawyers reclined on pillows mound the large, airy room as the Yemenis recounted what they knew of their missing brother's journey through the network of U.S. detention. Abdulsalam brokered large-scale construction deals, and several years ago he arranged to help some Egyptian contractors build universities. When the Egyptians stiffed him, he flew to Cairo to sort it out. Within days he was detained by Egyptian intelligence officers. The family's theory was that the cheating businessmen somehow framed their brother. More likely, though, Abdulsalam fits into that second category of detainees: those who are not necessarily suspected of wrongdoing but might have valuable intelligence. As a tribal leader, Abdulsalam had been instrumental in helping Arab Afghan fighters return home after the Yemeni civil war. This association with foreign fighters may have interested the American military, but no one can say for sure.

After several days of interrogation in Cairo, Abdulsalam was loaded into a minibus by the Egyptian intelligence officers and taken to the airport. On the runway a group of ski-masked men waited in front of a private plane. According to flight plans obtained by British journalist Stephen Grey, the day after Abdulsalam disappeared a Gulfstream V, tail-number N379P, left Dulles airport in the early morning, landed in Athens, and then continued on to Cairo, landing the day before the Egyptians handed Abdulsalam over to the hooded soldiers. The soldiers cut off his suit, stripped him naked, and searched him. They dressed him in a blue jumpsuit and blindfolded him. He was loaded onto the plane, where he was waist-cuffed, hooded, and gagged. That night, at 11:01, the CIA plane left Cairo for Kabul. This plane was and is owned by Premiere Executive Transport Services, a CIA front company. Its tail number has since been changed at least three times.

Abdulsalam was imprisoned in Afghanistan for two years, first in a prison the detainees call the "dark prison," because prisoners there are held in total darkness. At the dark prison, Abdulsalam was hung from the wall by chains. As he would eventually explain to his lawyer, "In the prison of darkness, they made up stories, and I said I'll thumbprint anything--just let me sleep and give me clothes. I was naked." One hand was cuffed to the wall at all times, which made it hard to sleep or to use the toilet. "It sounds bizarre at first," his lawyer Marc Falkoff told me. "But look at the leaked interrogation logs. They do weird, surreal things designed to disorient and humiliate the men."

Meanwhile, Abdulsalam's family had no idea where he had gone. The Egyptian Embassy in Yemen said that he'd been sent "on a special plane" to Baku, Azerbaijan. Finally, they received a letter smuggled out of Afghanistan by another prisoner. Abdulsalam wrote that after almost two years in Afghanistan he was taken to the U.$. base at Bagram. In 2002, two Afghan men were killed there after being chained and hung from the ceiling and brutally beaten. According to a coroner's testimony, one of the deceased, a taxi driver named Dilawar, had his legs "pulpified." If he'd lived, both of them would have required amputation. Like many detainees, Abdulsalam prefers not to talk about his time at Bagram, because, he says, the "wounds are too bad."

In September of 2004, Abdulsalam was on one of the very last airlifts from Bagram to Cuba, along with nine other detainees, some of whom had been rendered to third-party countries before transfer to Afghanistan. The June 2004 Supreme Court decision in Rasul v. Bush, which established the detainees' right to habeas corpus, meant that Cuba would no longer be a legal black hole. The number of detainees at Bagram, which no one could claim was U.S. soil, soon swelled from 100 to more than 600. Some prisoners, though, have simply disappeared--most likely into the shadow world of CIA black sites.

In Yemen I met with Zacharia bin al Shibh, elder brother of Ramzi, reportedly one of the 9/11 plotters. "You know what was the biggest surprise for me?" he said. "Seeing his picture on Al Jazeera with his big beard." He pulled a picture from his wallet. The brothers had the same deep-set eyes. His family thought Ramzi worked in a German bank. Apparently, he was roommates with Mohammad Atta and had joined the Hamburg Cell.

"I had no idea he was an extremist," Zacharia said, "and it's too hard to say I believe it now." Ramzi was arrested after a shootout in Karachi in 2002 and was immediately handed over to the U.S. He was reportedly flown to Thailand, but now he has vanished. Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff has said that interrupting Ramzi's interrogation would cause "immediate and irreparable" damage.

"We know American history better than our own," Zacharia said. "Even the Nazis who burned more than half the world were given a fair trial." As he showed me out he asked, under his breath, "Is he alive or dead?"

Toward the end of our trip, Tina and I traveled to Afghanistan so that she could search for family members of the 100 or so Afghans still in Guantánamo. We were hoping as well to speak with former detainees who'd been held in the detention centers closest to the fighting, known as "forward operating bases." The U.S. military has at various times made use of some twenty-five holding facilities in Afghanistan, though there may be more. Along with two translators, Tina and I drove three hours south from Kabul, then climbed a snowy pass and dropped down into the valley town of Gardez to meet Dr. Rafiullah Bidar of the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission. He'd put out word of our visit in advance so that families who feared their sons were detained in Cuba could come and talk to Tina. Some had traveled for days.
<div align="right">
<img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10023/gulag2.png" align="right"></div>
As we walked up the path to Dr. Bidar's squat stucco office, we passed a group of twenty angry-looking men in gray turbans beneath a stand of eucalyptus trees. I asked our translator who they were, but no one seemed to know. Dr. Bidar's office monitors U.S. detention in three Afghan provinces--Paktia, Paktika, and Khost--where, according to former detainees, there are at least three U.S. prisons, one of which is undisclosed. The commission has documented eighty-five cases of abuse by U.S. soldiers. "Every journalist comes through this office," Dr. Bidar said as we sat on his couch. He handed around a plate of wilted cookies and told a story about a young human-rights worker recently killed in Iraq, and how, just months earlier, she had sat on this very couch saying that she didn't want to go back to Baghdad.

Here, as in Iraq, the closer you get to the fighting the worse things are for the detainees. Detainees aren't supposed to be held near the fighting for more than ten days, but many talk about being held for a month. And because there is no formal system for finding out who is detained in such a place, anyone held there is a virtual ghost. Dr. Bidar has made repeated requests to the U.S. military to be allowed to visit the base near Gardez, as not even the Red Cross has been there, but these requests have been denied.

Tina set up shop in a small cold room, and family members filed in one by one to tell the stories of missing sons and to ask questions. Sitting stiffly in front of a video camera, most looked down and spoke in a monotone as they shared familiarities--a love of computers, the time so-and-so fell out of a window--that might later win a lawyer a detainee's trust. Just next door a counselor named Jamila met with a woman who was about to be given to another family because of a blood feud: one of her relatives had killed a man, and she was intended as payment for the death. Over the past three years, the commission has successfully intervened in a number of such cases. When Jamita learned that I was looking for men who'd been detained in forward operating bases, she put on her coat and said, "There is a family I think you should meet."

We drove to a nearby compound. Jamila disappeared inside for a moment, then reappeared at a green door and beckoned to me. I stepped over a pair of a child's muddy rubber boots and followed her under a piece of lace and into a carpeted receiving room filled with terra-cotta pots of geraniums and zinnias.

We were met by Haji Mohammad, a man of about fifty, who showed us around the house and told us his story. One night in January 2004, as his family slept, a group of American soldiers pounded on the door. The soldiers ordered the fourteen adults and fifteen children living there out into the frozen courtyard while they searched the house. Haji showed me where shots had been fired into the roof. "They broke the locks on all of our trunks," he said. "Maybe they heard I'd gone to Saudi Arabia twenty-five years ago." He said that the Americans took several thousand dollars in cash and a gold clock, as well as a Thuraya satellite phone and a couple of Kalashnikovs. It seemed a large claim to make, but later Dr. Bidar told me that stolen money is a common complaint after raids.

Haji disappeared for a minute behind the lace and returned with a laminated paper and what looked like a thick hospital bracelet with the number BT958 on it and, next to the number, a digital picture of a man in an orange jumpsuit with a shaved head. I didn't recognize the man until Haji pointed to himself. It was his prison tag from Bagram. I peered at the laminated paper and read, "This individual has been determined to pose no threat to the United States Armed Forces or its interests in Afghanistan." During the raid, Haji had been arrested with his young son, Tab My attention was directed to a quiet boy nearby with grease-covered hands. Since the raid, Taj had dropped out of school and was learning to be a mechanic to help support his family.

The soldiers hooded and cuffed the father and son and took them to the detention center at the Gardez forward operating base, a small, dirty jail where prisoners were packed together. "We were fed and allowed to go to the bathroom once every two days," Taj said. "We couldn't lie down to sleep." The men were repeatedly beaten, and they weren't given water to perform ablutions before praying. "I wore a hood for eighteen days," Taj told me. If any soldier had bothered to remove Taj's hood, he would have found beneath it a twelve-year-old child.

Haji was taken to Bagram, where 500 detainees are currently being held in conditions much worse than those in Cuba. There he was kept in "a kind of steel net" for seven months with sixteen other men under bright lights that shone around the clock. If a prisoner tried to cover his face, he was punished by being made to assume and maintain "stress positions." Then, inexplicably, Haji was released, He even got an apology. "The Americans said they were sorry," he grimaced, "and they gave me two dollars to get home."

"They said, 'Because you're innocent, we'll give you this paper.'" He held up the sheet again, which he'd laminated and, like many other former detainees I met, kept with him at all times in case he was stopped again. Because it was in English, he couldn't read it himself, and so he didn't know that the line at the bottom read, This has no bearing on future misconduct.

When we arrived back at the Human Rights Commission, those same gray-turbaned men I had noticed beneath the eucalyptus trees were now lined up outside the door, glowering. I went to ask Dr. Bidar if he had any idea who they were. "They've been waiting all day to speak to you," he said. "They were held at Bagram."

Among those waiting was a man named Najibullah, who said that until his release in May of 2004 he had been repeatedly beaten. He also said that he had been given an injection he believed would cause sterility. He likened the cage he was kept in to an animal kennel. For days he received no food. He was short-shackled and forced to squat between three soldiers and two Afghan translators. "They kicked me around like a football," he said.

The next man to enter the room said that before giving information about Bagram he wanted to tell a joke. "You know those monkeys who are forced to dance in the bazaar?" he asked. "Afghans are those monkeys. First the Soviets, then the Pakistanis, and now America forces us to dance." Lately, he said, he'd been trotted out to meet every human-rights delegation and journalist who came through Gardez. "How is telling you this story going to help me?" he asked. He pulled out the same laminated letter that Haji Mohammad had shown me, then left.

Dr. Bidar was somewhat embarrassed. "It was the Afghans themselves who pointed one another out to the Americans," he said. Now they wanted justice from the Americans in the form of reparations none would ever receive, even those whose businesses had been destroyed and whose homes had been looted. An increasing rage, as well as the lack of security in the villages, was making these men perfect fodder for the resurgent Taliban. Just the day before, in Kandahar, a suicide bomber had attacked the police headquarters, killing thirteen people. Even as we returned to the relative safety of Kabul, there were rumors that more suicide bombers were expected. A couple of attempted kidnappings made it unwise to stroll about the town.

In Kabul the lawyers among us continued their efforts to track down their clients' families. Because of the security situation, they couldn't travel outside of the capital, so Tina and her cohorts depended on a local network of detainee families to spread the word about free legal aid for those in Guantánamo. Sadly, most families made the trip because they had loved ones in Bagram, only to discover that there was nothing the lawyers could do: so far it has been next to impossible to prove that U.S. law applies them. One afternoon, as the lawyers sat in the canteen at their guesthouse, a Talib arrived on crutches from Kandahar. Terrified and angry, he didn't look like the other tribesmen and had trouble convincing the guard at the guesthouse to let him in. The Talib refused to give his name. He said that he wanted help in freeing his brother from Bagram. He said that a Bagram guard had used a cell phone to take a photograph of his brother's pulverized face, and that if no one would help him he was considering becoming a suicide bomber.

Although about 100 Afghans are still being detained in Guantánamo, some of the more high-profile detainees have begun to return home. It isn't easy to return in the middle of an ongoing war, and some have become the unlikely spokesmen for civil liberties. One of these is Abdul Salam Zaeef, who formerly served as the Taliban ambassador to Islamabad. He is currently under house arrest with his two wives and eight children in a muddy and new section of Kabul. Zaeef spent the past three years in Cuba and then was suddenly released last September just in time for Afghanistan's elections, a political move he says was designed to appease the Afghan people and convince them to support the American-backed Karzai government.

Zaeef's journey through U.S. detention is unusual in that he was held aboard a ship. The Department of Defense claims that it does not keep detainees on Navy vessels, but, according to Human Rights First, at least two ships, the USS Bataan and the USS Peleliu, have been used as brigs. Zaeef spent a week aboard the ship, then was taken to Bagram. "Bagram was the worst kind of mistreatment," he told us. "The first night, the soldiers broke my shoulder, took off all of my clothes, and threw me out into the snow." After several hours, he lost consciousness. "I was sure they were going to kill me," he said, "so I wanted them to do it more quickly."

Once he arrived in Cuba, Zaeef served as an ambassador of sorts between the Afghan detainees and the U.S. military. He counted out the seven hunger strikes on his fingers. "We asked them to give us our rights according to the Geneva Conventions," he said. (Lawyers had sent copies of the Geneva Conventions, in Arabic, to Guantánamo.) Zaeef then met directly with Colonel Mike Bumgardner, who oversaw interrogations at the time, and was told that Secretary Rumsfeld had agreed to some of the demands. Along with five other chosen leaders among the detainees, Zaeef was granted permission to meet detainees to convince them to eat, but the promised changes at the camp never materialized. All six of the chosen leaders were taken to solitary confinement in Camp Echo. Five clays later, Zaeef was sent back to Afghanistan. Before he was flown home, Zaeef was presented with a paper similar to the one given to Abdullah from Bahrain. "It said, number one, the detainee confesses to his crime; number two, the detainee asks for forgiveness; number three, the detainee won't engage in terrorist acts again, which is an admission of guilt; number four, the detainee won't have any links with Al Qaeda; number five, the detainee is thankful to the United States for releasing him."

"I was told if I wouldn't sign the paper, I wouldn't be released." He didn't care. "You made me sit here for three years. You can make me sit here for my entire life, but I'm not a criminal and I won't sign it." Finally, after several hours of this, the soldier across from him gave up and said, "Okay, you write something." So Zaeef took the paper and wrote, "I was kept here for three years and I am not a criminal."

"The American interrogators told me to be cautious about you," Zaeef said, teasingly. "They said not to give you permission to be my lawyers. I'd be in trouble forever and the case would never go away." He smiled. "The interrogators said that lawyers are bad people and that they're always after bad things."

Another former Talib, Mohammed Ibrahim Sahadat, is now one of Afghanistan's leading defense lawyers. He finds the job overwhelming. On one of our last days in Afghanistan, Ibrahim rook Tina and me to visit Policharki Prison, where the United Nations is now helping to revamp the block that will house former detainees from Guantánamo Bay. With white turrets and a sullen concrete needle that serves as a watchtower, Policharki looks as if it is made of Soviet-style Legos. Built in the 1970s, and expanded during the Soviet occupation, Policharki was the site of frequent executions for more than twenty years. According to CNN, some 70,000 bodies are buried in mass graves in the surrounding plains. Today, Policharki houses about 2,000 prisoners, including the Afghan Christian convert recently tried for his faith and three Americans who ran a private prison in Kabul and were convicted of torture. The prison also holds hundreds of former Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters. Two weeks before our visit, Ibrahim told us, seven Talibs had broken out of the prison. The men had escaped with their families during visiting hours. One of them had been a client of his, he said a bit sheepishly. After the escape, eleven guards had been arrested, and even the warden was under investigation. As a result of the prison break, the detainees were going to be forced to wear uniforms for the first time.

The day we visited was sunny and bright, turning the recent snow to mush. As we waited around a wood stove for permission to visit the new cellblock, a grumbly Tajik guard from the Panjshir Valley--the new face of the law in Afghanistan--eyed us from across the room. He did not offer us tea.

"If I were the warden," he said, "I wouldn't let you in here." Later, as he grudgingly led us toward the new block, he spoke up again and said, "This is the worst war ever."

As we tromped through a muddy field behind the prison, a man appeared from a shiny white United Nations trailer. His name was Sohail Sahibi, and he was an engineer. He was overseeing the work on the Guantánamo block on behalf of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). He looked at us strangely. Here we were: a former Talib, a huge red-haired Pashtun, a Persian-looking woman with a video camera, and an amoebic American scrawling notes. He was friendly enough, though, and he led us through the large half-built cells and pointed out where new bathrooms would be installed and where, in the center, the prisoners would be able to exercise.

There wasn't much to see there--just four old cement bankers that looked a lot like a dilapidated U.S. prison. And as Sahibi led us through the old cells, he seemed to grow increasingly suspicious. He asked us again who we were. When finally he understood that Tina was one of the American lawyers attempting to free Afghans at Guantánamo, he broke into a sudden smile. "Come back to the trailer," he said. "Have tea with me."

As we sat in the U.N. trailer, on brand-new office chairs still covered in plastic, he served us tea and stale chocolates, and said, "My uncle has been in the U.S. prison at Bagram for two months." He said that his uncle, a shepherd named Saqi Jan, had wanted to build a bridge over the river between his village and the next so that his sheep could cross the water to graze. The neighboring village didn't want more livestock traffic, so they reported the old man to the Americans as a member of Al Qaeda. Outside, workers poured the foundation for the new prison. Over the sound of the cement mixer's engine, Sahibi asked if Tina could help get his uncle out of detention. "He's an innocent old man," he said. "Can you help get him free?"

Three weeks after our tea, a riot broke out in Policharki when some of the 350 Al Qaeda and Taliban inmates seized control of their block for several days. Smoke poured out of windows as the inmates set fire to whatever they could find. One of the three Americans convicted of torturing people in a private prison got caught up in the rioting. Frantic, he called the Associated Press from inside the prison on a contraband cell phone: "They said they are going to chop off my head." The prisoners chanted "Death to America" and dropped notes about their mistreatment through the bars. Apparently the protest began when several "high-value" inmates refused to accept the new dress code.

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"><hr>

muckraker10021 · Oct 14, 2006

Waterboarding Video

<embed src="http://www.current.tv/studio/vm2/vm2.swf?type=preview&id=13488346" quality="high" flashvars="videoType=preview&videoID=13488346" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="360" width="335"></embed>

Chitownheadbusa · Oct 14, 2006

muckraker10021 said:

Waterboarding Video

<embed src="http://www.current.tv/studio/vm2/vm2.swf?type=preview&id=13488346" quality="high" flashvars="videoType=preview&videoID=13488346" pluginspage="http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" height="360" width="335"></embed>

wtf

good ol U.S.A

those pics are bogus bizness.
pale face broad smiling over a dead body. :smh:

i understand why other countries hate the USA.
but they need to realize that not all americans are the same and dont agree with the actions taken by the government over tha past few years.
i wonder if they have start using these tactics on american prisoners.

muckraker10021 · Oct 14, 2006

chitownheadbusta said:
wtf

good ol U.S.A

pale face broad smiling over a dead body.

The pale face broad is Army Reserve Spc. Sabrina Harman, of the 372nd Military Police Company
<img src="http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20040501_30.jpg">
Spc. Sabrina Harman over the body of Manadel al-Jamadi

bush-cheney-rumsfeld used her as a pawn. Read below how the army reduced her rank to private, she will forfeit all pay and allowances, and she will receive a bad conduct discharge.

http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/read.php?story_id_key=7348

<IMG SRC="http://www4.army.mil/ocpa/uploads/medium/OCPA-2005-05-19-113513.jpg">
Spc. Sabrina Harman, formerly of the 372nd Military Police Company, walks out of Fort Hood’s Lawrence H. Williams Judicial Center 

[rm]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/mmedia/nation/052104-1v.ram[/rm]

VIDEOS AMPLIFY PICTURES OF VIOLENCE

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/20040501_1.htm

<HR NOSHADE COLOR="#FF0000" SIZE="12"></HR>

neo_cacos · Oct 15, 2006

Hmmm...interesting discussions.

I'm not pro or anti-terrorist, it's all relative.

But I can say this.: The most important point is not wether the US uses torture or that the the terrorists use torture.

I think ANY citizen should be concerned when they goverment is laying out the ground work to make torture legal.

Those tactics are not restricted to foreign detainees, it can and will be used against the country's own citizen.

Neo

U.S. Has Detained 83,000 in War on Terror -108 DEAD

Superstar *****

The Quizatz Haderach

Star

Star

Star

Rising Star

Rising Star

Star

Rising Star

Star

Star

Star

Rising Star

The Quizatz Haderach

Star

Rising Star

Star

Rising Star

Star

Potential Star

The Quizatz Haderach

Star

Superstar *****

The Quizatz Haderach

Star

Star

The Quizatz Haderach

Star

Star

Superstar *****

Superstar *****

Superstar *****

♏|God|♏

Superstar *****

Potential Star

Similar threads