Category Archives: Torture

First there was the NY Times story that “The Bush administration based a crucial prewar assertion about ties between Iraq and Al Qaeda on detailed statements made by a prisoner while in Egyptian custody who later said he had fabricated them” in order to avoid torture. (Robert Waldman notes that this did get reported months ago, although it seems to have gone down the memory hole.)

Now comes a suggestion in the UK’s Observer — sadly, not an utterly reliable source — that CIA officers are getting cold feet about carrying on with these ‘renditions’. But not because they produce false intelligence. No, it’s the fear of law suits.

The Observer buried the leed: They start with the Yet Another Torture Allegation (YATA) story that An Ethiopian student who lived in London claims that he was brutally tortured with the involvement of British and US intelligence agencies. It seems that
Mr. Binyam Mohammed, 27,

says he spent nearly three years in the CIA’s network of ‘black sites’. In Morocco he claims he underwent the strappado torture of being hung for hours from his wrists, and scalpel cuts to his chest and penis and that a CIA officer was a regular interrogator.

Then there’s a tie-in the Padilla case:

Western agencies believed that he was part of a plot to buy uranium in Asia, bring it to the US and build a ‘dirty bomb’ in league with Jose Padilla, a US citizen. Mohammed signed a confession but told his lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith, he had never met Padilla, or anyone in al-Qaeda.

That’s interesting. But the really eye-catching part comes next:

A senior US intelligence official told The Observer that the CIA is now in ‘deep crisis’ following last week’s international political storm over the agency’s practice of ‘extraordinary rendition’ – transporting suspects to countries where they face torture. ‘The smarter people in the Directorate of Operations [the CIA’s clandestine operational arm] know that one day, if they do this stuff, they are going to face indictment,’ he said. ‘They are simply refusing to participate in these operations, and if they don’t have big mortgage or tuition fees to pay they’re thinking about trying to resign altogether.’

Could we actually be getting somewhere? And does this explain the nearly-rabid efforts by the Bush administration to keep the CIA exempt from suit for torture and ‘cruel, inhuman and degrading’ treatment?

But don’t get too optimistic: Binyam Mohammed got shipped to Guantanamo in September. UK and US law may not let evidence acquired under torture into court. But, so far that rule is inoperative in Guantanamo.

Read Obsidian Wings, Requiem.

Really, please read this, especially the last two thirds or so. It’s horrible.

Innocent people — people the government itself says are innocent — chained to the floor. Kept out of contact with their families. Denied reading materials in their language. Denied contact with their families. Denied not just contact with counsel, but even when they have lawyers, the lawyers are not told about hearings concerning the client — not even that the clients have been exonerated. Maybe two years before the fact slinks into open court. And it gets aired only because the court is considering a habeas petition.

When trying to describe the behavior of this administration regarding detainees in Guantanamo and elsewhere, not even Kafka provides us with a vocabulary or a set of categories. Compared to the casual barbarity of this crew, Kafka seems a weak thing, a bloodless amateur.

But not to worry. Americans’ tender consciences will henceforth be sheltered from having to face the facts about what this country’s government is doing in our name. Thanks to the ‘compromise’ brokered in the Senate regarding the Graham Amendment the odds are that we need not worry about new habeas motions — arguably need not even worry about the continued survival of existing habeas motions — that might produce facts dissonant with our comfortable ideas of the rule of law, minimal due process, or the lower bounds below which US officials could not routinely sink. Show’s over folks. Go about your business.

Barbarians are people who break what they don’t understand. And the current administration does not understand due process, human rights, or even common minimum decency.

Must the Senate prostate prostrate itself before these barbarians? [unintentional humor there, I’m afraid…]

Sen. Graham has a reputation as an honorable man, and of the GOP Senators has tended to be one of the better ones on the torture issue, probably due to his experience as an Army JAG officer. That makes his introduction of the Graham Amendment and especially the speech in support of the amendment so very hard to explain.

For a full-bore, devastating, refutation of the claim Sen. Graham made last week citing the danger of litigation abuse in support of his proposal to cut off meaningful judicial review of the conditions at Guantánamo — arguments that may well have swayed several votes (including his own, if he believed what he was being told) — see the dramatic deconstruction at Obsidian Wings. In the list that follows the titles are hilzoy’s and Katherine’s, but the rest is just my summaries of their much fuller and well-supported posts:

• About Them: Setting the scene, outline of Sen. Graham’s sensational charges about litigation abuse by detainees.
• Medical Malpractice: Initial attempt to refute Graham’s claim of litigation abuse; relies on general facts we know about medical abuse in Guantánamo.
• Medical Malpractice 2: Specific and detailed refutation of Sen. Graham, reporting the actual known facts regarding one of the two cases he himself cited as most supporting his claims: the prisoner claims “as a result of his detention at the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay, he is now confined to a wheelchair with two broken vertebrae. He said military personnel and interrogators stomped on his back, dropped him on the floor and repeatedly forced his neck forward soon after his arrival at the prison.” The so-called malpractice claim is that “he has been denied an operation that could save him from permanent paralysis”.
• Medical Malpractice 3: Contains further allegations about other prisoners at Guantánamo who were refused basic medical treatment in order to coerce their cooperation, all drawn from a legal brief filed to contest medical mis-treatment. As hilzoy and Katherine note, “bear in mind that none of this information would be available if Graham’s amendment had already been in force”.
• Caught On The Battlefield Sen. Graham argued that one reason to deny judicial review is that detainees are people “caught on the battlefield as the Nazis were caught on the battlefield”. This post demonstrates that there is vast and persuasive evidence that a number of the people held in Guantánamo were not caught in even the same country as any battlefield.
• Competent Tribunals: Sen. Graham describes the Guantánamo tribunals as “the Geneva Convention Protections on Steroids”. As readers of this blog know, it’s no such thing.
• Family Videos: Sen. Graham lampooned the courts for entertaining claims that Guantánamo detainees should be shown “family videos”. Here’s the actual, and quite horrible, story: Detainees reported that interrogators had previously impersonated defense counsel as a ruse to get detainees to talk to them; as a result the detainees mistrusted their actual lawyers. “The detainees … asked their lawyers to get videos showing that their families, or people they trusted, approved of these lawyers. The lawyers did so; the resulting DVDs contained less than seventeen minutes of material, combined. … All of this was done by counsel with security clearances, on equipment they had brought with them from the US”. They then submitted these materials to the government, asking that they be cleared so that they could be shown to the detainees, and noting that they would be traveling to Guantánamo in twelve days. … After various delays (… the government claimed that no one in all of Washington DC was capable of clearing the videos, that therefore they had to be sent to Guantánamo for clearance, and that transporting them would take two weeks), the attorneys were sent a message informing them of two things:
  

  (a) that the videos, etc. might not be cleared by the time they arrived, and

  (b) that if, on that visit, the detainees did not agree to be represented by them, the detainees would forfeit their right to counsel.”

  It was this Catch-22 which led to the lawsuit.

• More Frivolity: Now With Human Mops! Sen. Graham ridiculed the idea that a detainee “from a family of longstanding al-Qaida ties” and who had thrown a grenade that killed an army medic could be heard to request that his interrogators not use cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment against him. Sounds awful, right? How about three years of near-solitary confinement (with extra added alleged physical torture) for a child? And here’s the detainee’s allegation as to his recreational activities:
  

  He was left in these stress positions for a period of hours, and because he was not allowed to use the washroom, eventually urinated on the floor and upon himself and his clothing. Military police then poured a pine oil solvent onto the floor and onto Petitioner. With Petitioner on his stomach and his hands and feet cuffed together behind his back, they used Petitioner as a human mop, dragging him back and forth through the mixture of urine and pine oil. After he was returned to his cell, Petitioner was not allowed a change of clothes for two days.

If even half this stuff is true, do we really need to ensure that it be allowed to happen without any exterior checks — which is what will happen if the Graham Amendment closes off judicial review?