Category Archives: Torture

Yet Another Torture Allegation: US guards at Guantanamo tortured me, says UK man:

A British resident has claimed he was tortured by US guards at Guantanamo Bay, suffering violent sexual assaults, near drowning and an attack in which he was blinded.

The Independent on Sunday has been given a detailed account from Omar Deghayes of repeated abuse by American and Pakistani interrogators over the past three years including electric shocks and sodomy by US guards.

The allegations, made by human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, have persuaded British ministers to take up Mr Deghayes's case.

In some of the most disturbing allegations to emerge from Guantanamo, Mr Deghayes also accuses US and Pakistani interrogators of beating him repeatedly since his arrest three years ago, smearing his face with human excrement, starving him of food, and withdrawing light and clothing.

I've left out the gory details, but they're there in the Independent if you want them.

Mr Deghayes's testimony was recorded during more than 20 hours of interviews by his US attorney, Clive Stafford Smith, in a Guantanamo Bay cell in January and March this year, and has only recently been cleared by US Department of Justice censors.

Mr Stafford Smith said he found Mr Deghayes's testimony “totally credible”. He added: “He has been treated worse in Guantanamo than any other person I have come across. He is legally trained and tries to help other people there, so the Americans think he's a trouble-maker. Consequently, he's suffered for it.”

The claims are understood to have shocked the Foreign Office minister Baroness Symons, and played a major part in the Government's decision to directly intervene in the cases of five British residents still held at Guantanamo Bay. Until now, the UK has refused to intervene.

…

Mr Deghayes's case has alarmed human rights lawyers because the US has allowed Libyan intelligence officers to interrogate him in Cuba – even though he is a refugee from Col Gaddafi's regime.

Mr Stafford Smith said they could now “conclusively prove” that Mr Deghayes was the victim of mistaken identity. They had established that video footage allegedly showing him in Chechnya was of another man, who is now dead. Mr Deghayes had never been to Chechnya, the lawyer insisted.

Mr Deghayes was seized in the Pakistani city of Lahore in April 2002 by armed local intelligence officers, and alleges he was immediately subjected to repeated torture, threats against his wife and children, and violent assaults by his captors.

He claims the Pakistani interrogators told him they were holding him at US request, and insisted they had no interest in him. He claimed: “I underwent systematic beatings every night for three days. Each time, when I was nearly unconscious, I would be thrown back into the cell to await more.”

Oh, and there's lots more after that.

No one important is responsible. Got that?

Army Clears Top Abu Ghraib Case Officers: The Army has cleared four top officers – including the three-star general who commanded all U.S. forces in Iraq – of all allegations of wrongdoing in connection with prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib, officials said Friday. …

After assessing the allegations against Sanchez and taking sworn statements from 37 people involved in Iraq, the Army's inspector general, Lt. Gen. Stanley E. Green, concluded that the allegations were unsubstantiated, said the officials who were familiar with the details of Green's probe.

Green reached the same conclusion in the cases of two generals and a colonel who worked for Sanchez.

Strange, because the circumstantial evidence didn't look at all good for Sanchez. Which seemd to explain why he was the first guy sent out to 'investigate' (read, 'keep a lid on it').

So the official line remains: just a few (dozen, hundred) widely dispersed low-ranking bad apples in several locations who were encouraged by email from Washington to do the same things. None of whom ranked above sergeant, except maybe one female scapegoat reservist general, who says her orders came from … Sanchez.

[Update: Last link added 4/23]

How is it that the Administration can flout a law that requires it to tell all the members of the Intelligence Committee what it is up to? According to White House Has Tightly Restricted Oversight of C.I.A. Detentions, that's what it's doing.

The White House is maintaining extraordinary restrictions on information about the detention of high-level terror suspects, permitting only a small number of members of Congress to be briefed on how and where the prisoners are being held and interrogated, senior government officials say.

Some Democratic members of Congress say the restrictions are impeding effective oversight of the secret program, which is run by the Central Intelligence Agency and is believed to involve the detention of about three dozen senior Qaeda leaders at secret sites around the world.

By law, the White House is required to notify the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of all intelligence-gathering activities. But the White House has taken the stance that the secret detention program is too sensitive to be described to any members other than the top Republican and Democrat on each panel.

My first reaction was, 'these people don't care at all about the law.'

My second reaction was, 'Congress could force disclosure if it wanted to. The problem here is that Congress is being supine.'

To date, Congress has not opened any inquiry or held hearings on the C.I.A.'s detention program, despite indications that agency personnel were involved in abuses of some prisoners. That record is in contrast to the public scrutiny that the Congressional armed services committees have imposed on the military's involvement in interrogation and detention, including the abuses at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.

Yup, pretty supine.

But then there's a third reaction, and that one is if anything worse than the first two: Congress doesn't want to know. Could it be that lots of Senators — especially the Republicans who, were they guilty with knowledge might have to take part in internecine warfare — are secretly grateful to have the secrets kept away?

[Plus, on close reading, call it a fourth reaction, the NYT article is a little ambiguous as to whether the Admnistration is flouting the law overtly, or just abusing the classification system. And it being late, I haven't the energy to research it right now.]

Reuters.com: The top U.S. commander in Iraq authorized prisoner interrogation tactics more harsh than accepted Army practice, including using guard dogs to exploit “Arab fear of dogs,” a memo made public on Tuesday showed.

The Sept. 14, 2003, memo by Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, then the senior commander in Iraq, was released by the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained it from the government under court order through the Freedom of Information Act.

“The memo clearly establishes that Gen. Sanchez authorized unlawful interrogation techniques for use in Iraq, and in particular these techniques violate the Geneva Conventions and the Army's own field manual governing interrogations,” ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh said in an interview.

Um, yes, but this is news? We have known about Gen. Sanchez's role in allowing prisoner abuses for a long time. Which is why Rumsfeld's choice of Sanchez to write the first report on the Abu Ghraib abuses was clearly designed to be a cover-up—because there was no one with a stronger incentive to keep the lid on things.

Will Rumsfeld be tried for war crimes some day? There is universal jurisdiction and there is no statute of limitations.

Update: Sanchez prevaricates to the point of perjury when testifying before Congress.