Category Archives: Torture

I guess I'm just too simple-minded to keep up with the news. Maybe it's a reading comprehension thing. But my understanding was that the CIA was an intelligence agency. That means that they are supposed to have a clue or two as to what goes on abroad — even to look past official statements sometimes and perceive a hint of reality.

What then to make of the CIA's claims that it is shocked and surprised when the brutal foreign intelligence agencies to whom it hands over prisoners (via 'renditions') break their verbal commitments not to torture the prisoners, and instead proceed in their customary fashion?

At this point I'm left wondering whether the CIA wants us to think of them as really, really stupid or really, really guilty.

Today's Washington Post reports that once the CIA has handed over the victim to foreign torturers, the CIA's delicate sensibilities prevent it from asking too many questions in order that the sensitive foreigners not feel obliged to sully themselves with lies:

CIA's Assurances On Transferred Suspects Doubted: [An] Arab diplomat, whose country is actively engaged in counterterrorism operations and shares intelligence with the CIA, said it is unrealistic to believe the CIA really wants to follow up on the assurances. “It would be stupid to keep track of them because then you would know what's going on,” he said. “It's really more like 'Don't ask, don't tell.' “

At least the House is is beginning to worry about our outsourcing torture:

The House voted 420 to 2 yesterday to prohibit the use of supplemental appropriations to support actions that contravene anti-torture statutes. The measure's co-author, Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), singled out renditions, saying “diplomatic assurances not to torture are not credible, and the administration knows it.”

Over in the Senate, however, it's CYA time:

Republicans and Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee failed to agree Tuesday on whether to open a formal investigation into U.S. interrogation and detention practices.

“It was probably the least constructive meeting of the Intelligence Committee that I have ever been to,” West Virginia Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, the panel's top Democrat, said after a closed committee session.

Rockefeller said the committee was “not facing its oversight responsibilities with sufficient seriousness” on subjects that would affect the country for the next 30 to 40 years.

All seven of the committee's Democratic members have requested a formal review of interrogation and detention practices by the U.S. intelligence apparatus. The Democrats also want to look into “renditions” — a practice of transferring foreigners to other countries for detention and questioning.

…

“I believe the system is working,” [Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat] Roberts said.

Stupid or guilty? Definitely guilty.

Yet Another Torture Allegation: Dana Priest, CIA Avoids Scrutiny of Detainee Treatment.

In November 2002, a newly minted CIA case officer in charge of a secret prison just north of Kabul allegedly ordered guards to strip naked an uncooperative young Afghan detainee, chain him to the concrete floor and leave him there overnight without blankets, according to four U.S. government officials aware of the case.

The Afghan guards — paid by the CIA and working under CIA supervision in an abandoned warehouse code-named the Salt Pit — dragged their captive around on the concrete floor, bruising and scraping his skin, before putting him in his cell, two of the officials said.

As night fell, so, predictably, did the temperature.

By morning, the Afghan man had frozen to death.

The CIA says it's investigating — two years after the fact. Which is an odd claim, since the first reaction was coverup,

[The victim] is on no one's registry of captives, not even as a “ghost detainee,” the term for CIA captives held in military prisons but not registered on the books, they said.

And the second reaction was just as predictable with this crew:

The CIA case officer, meanwhile, has been promoted.

Of course the whole thing was rotten from the start as the CIA took the official view that US rules didn't apply to what it called an Afghan facility. Never mind that the CIA paid for it, paid all the salaries, decided who would be held there, and pretty much ran it. The CIA still claimed it was a “foreign facility”. Deniability and all that (including deniability towards Congress).

The only vaguely good news here is that apparently torture is considered a low-status activity in the CIA.

“A first-tour officer was put in charge because there were not enough senior-level volunteers,” said one intelligence officer familiar with the case. “It's not a job just anyone would want. More senior people said, 'I don't want to do that.'

Updating ACLU & Human Rights First to File Torture Allegations Against 'High Ranking US Official' below: Reuters reports that the “high-ranking US official” being sued is indeed Rumsfeld.

Two human rights groups plan to file a lawsuit charging a high-ranking U.S. official with violation of the U.S. Constitution and international laws prohibiting torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

According to their press release,

At a 10:30 a.m. news conference [in Washington later today], the American Civil Liberties Union and Human Rights First (formerly Lawyers Committee for Human Rights), joined by former military and government officials, will announce a lawsuit against a high-ranking U.S. government official on behalf of eight men who were tortured and abused by U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The lawsuit will charge that officials at the highest level bear ultimate responsibility for the physical and psychological injuries these men suffered. The men represented in the lawsuit were incarcerated in U.S. detention facilities in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were subjected to torture and other cruel and degrading treatment, including severe and repeated beatings, cutting with knives, sexual humiliation and assault, mock executions, death threats, and restraint in contorted and excruciating positions. None of the men were ever charged with a crime.

Who is the official? I have no idea, although Rumsfeld would be my first guess, followed by Gonzales, followed by whoever Rumsfeld put in charge of the information extraction program (would that be Feith?)

The case could have everything – fights over discovery of classified information, claims of multifarious sorts of immunity, and (from the sound of it) maybe even debates over the scope of the alien tort statute. Oh, and the smell of justice. Don't forget the smell of justice. Even if the wheels of justice grind exceedingly slow.

Mother Jones Magazine summarizes the state of play regarding various torture allegations in Afghanistan. In addition to allegations of brutalization (“they rammed a stick up my rectum”), there's the usual two forms of coverup: ship people out, punish only the small fry.

From Bagram to Abu Ghraib. Hundreds of prisoners have come forward, often reluctantly, offering accounts of harsh interrogation techniques including sexual brutality, beatings, and other methods designed to humiliate and inflict physical pain. At least eight detainees are known to have died in U.S. custody in Afghanistan, and in at least two cases military officials ruled that the deaths were homicides. Many of the incidents were known to U.S. officials long before the Abu Ghraib scandal erupted; yet instead of disciplining those involved, the Pentagon transferred key personnel from Afghanistan to the Iraqi prison.

…

The lawyers also fault the military and the Pentagon for failing to track responsibility for the abuses up the chain of command. To date, only 10 soldiers have been prosecuted for crimes involving prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq—none of them above the rank of staff sergeant. “All of the investigations have looked down rather than up,” says Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer at the ACLU. “Our goal is to hold high-level officials accountable for the policies and practices that caused widespread torture, and to hold them accountable for their failure to stop the abuse once it came to light. This is really about who bears ultimate responsibility.”

…

Outside investigators, meanwhile, have been almost entirely barred from the Afghan detention centers. The International Committee for the Red Cross has had no access to any of them except Bagram, and even there its representatives have not been able to see all parts of the facility. Former prisoners have said the Red Cross never visited detainees being held in the upstairs cells, including Dilawar and Habibullah. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have not been allowed to visit the base at all; neither has the Afghan human rights commission, which has been asking the U.S. military for access to Bagram and other detention centers for a year. “We expected to have a friendly relationship with the coalition forces,” says deputy chair Hakim. “But what the coalition has done, the abuses, overshadows the friendly aspect of the American intervention. I ask you: What is the difference between the Americans and the Soviet forces who occupied Afghanistan?”