Posts Tagged ‘CIA’

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CIA medics joined in Guantánamo torture sessions, says Red Cross

April 8, 2009

Leaked ICRC report claims medical staff monitored terror suspects during waterboarding

Guantánamo Bay detainee

A detainee carrying prayer beads in Guantanamo Bay. Photograph: Brennan Linsley/AP

Medical personnel committed a “gross breach of medical ethics” by taking part in torture in Guantánamo, a leaked International Committee of the Red Cross document has revealed.

The 40-page confidential report, written in 2007, describes how medical staff working for the CIA monitored prisoners’ vital signs to make sure they did not drown while being subjected to waterboarding, during which water is poured over a cloth placed over a person’s nose and mouth.

Medical personnel were also said to be present when prisoners were shackled in a “stress standing position”. The detainees were “monitored by health personnel who in some instances recommended stopping the method of ill-treatment, or recommended its continuation, but with adjustments”, according to the report.

The Red Cross concluded: “The alleged participation of health personnel in the interrogation process and, either directly or indirectly, in the infliction of ill-treatment constituted a gross breach of medical ethics and, in some cases, amounted to participation in torture and/or cruel inhuman or degrading treatment.”

As well as the monitoring of specific methods of ill-treatment, the report said, other health personnel were alleged to have directly participated in the interrogation process. One detainee alleged that a health person threatened that medical care would be conditional upon cooperation with interrogation.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-confessed mastermind of the September 11 attacks, alleged to the ICRC that on several occasions the waterboarding was stopped “on the intervention of a health person who was present in the room each time this procedure was used”.

Mohammed, who pleaded guilty last year to the September 11 attacks, said he gave a lot of false information during the harshest period of his interrogation.

“Im sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the US,” he told the Red Cross.

In another case, Encep Nuraman (aka Hambali) alleged that a medical person intervened to prevent further use of the prolonged stress standing position, but told him that “I look after your body only because we need you for information”.

Walid bin Attash, who had previously had a leg amputated, told the ICRC that when he was forced for days to stand with his arms shackled above his head and his feet touching the floor, a person he assumed to be a doctor would measure the swelling in his intact leg and eventually ordered that he be allowed to sit.

Florian Westphal, head of media at the Red Cross in Geneva, confirmed the authenticity of the document obtained by Mark Danner of New York Review of Books and posted on its website, but declined to comment on the contents of the report. “It is a legitimate document. It is extremely unusual for an ICRC document on detention procedures to be leaked publicly,” he said.

“We regret this as it is important for us to be able to discuss matters confidentially with governments, which gives us the credibility to influence them.”

Besides descriptions of how the men were tortured, the report conveys the impatience and frustration of the Red Cross in trying to extract information from the Bush administration. The Red Cross made its first written interventions to the US authorities in 2002, requesting information on the whereabouts of people allegedly held by the Americans in the context of the fight against terrorism.

“Despite repeated requests at various levels of the US government, the ICRC has not received a response to most of these written interventions,” the report said.

It took four years once the Red Cross first raised the issue with the Bush administration before it was given access to 14 detainees at Guantánamo, including Mohammed. The report welcomed the decision to grant access to the men, but “deplores the fact that these persons were held in undisclosed detention during a prolonged period by the US authorities and the conditions of treatment to which they were subjected during the time”.

The methods of ill-treatment alleged to have been used, the report said, included waterboarding, standing naked with arms extended and chained above the head for periods of two three days continuously, beatings by the use of a collar held around the detainees’ neck to bang heads and bodies against the wall, prolonged nudity for weeks or months and prolonged shackling.

Those who were shackled “had to urinate and and defecate on themselves and remain standing in their own bodily fluids for periods of several days”.

While the report described practices that have been repudiated by the Obama administration, an Red Cross official who wished to remain anonymous said it was “important for today’s authorities to have this information from an independent source”.

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CIA reveals it has 3,000 pages of documents relating to destroyed interrogation tapes

March 21, 2009

John Byrne | The Raw Story
Published: Friday March 20, 2009
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The Central Intelligence Agency disclosed Friday that it has 3,000 summaries, transcripts, reconstructions and memoranda relating to 92 interrogation videotapes that were destroyed by the agency, the American Civil Liberties Union revealed Friday evening.

The agency, however, says they won’t make them public or provide them to the civil rights group. The disclosure came as part of a lawsuit.

The CIA says they incinerated the tapes to protect the identities of agents involved in the interrogations. Their destruction came at the same time a federal judge was seeking information from Bush administration lawyers about the interrogation of alleged al Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah.

The CIA also refused to publicly disclose any witnesses who may have viewed the destroyed tapes or had custody of them prior to their destruction.

“The government is still needlessly withholding information about these tapes from the public, despite the fact that the CIA’s use of torture is well known,” Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU, said in a release. “Full disclosure of the CIA’s illegal interrogation methods is long overdue and the agency must be held accountable for flouting the rule of law.”

The CIA could not be reached for comment.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the information came to light late Friday and was sent out by the ACLU in a release at 6:44PM ET. Organizations and agencies often release unfavorable information on Friday evenings, because American newspapers have the lowest circulation on Saturdays.

More from the ACLU’s release issued Friday follows.

In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for its destruction of the tapes in violation of a court order requiring the agency to produce or identify all records requested by the ACLU. That motion is still pending.

The agency’s latest submission came in response to an August 20, 2008 court order issued in the context of the contempt motion. That order required the agency to produce “a list of any summaries, transcripts, or memoranda regarding the [destroyed tapes] and of any reconstruction of the records’ contents” as well as a list of witnesses who may have viewed the videotapes or retained custody of the videotapes before their destruction. The CIA will provide these lists to the court for in camera review on March 26, 2009.

Earlier this month, the CIA acknowledged it destroyed 92 tapes of interrogations. The tapes, some of which show CIA operatives subjecting suspects to extremely harsh interrogation methods, should have been identified and processed for the ACLU in response to its Freedom of Information Act request demanding information on the treatment and interrogation of detainees in U.S. custody. The tapes were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, appointed by former President Bush and Congress, which had formally requested that the CIA hand over transcripts and recordings documenting the interrogation of CIA prisoners.

The government’s letter to U.S. District Court Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the Southern District of New York is available online here.

The ACLU’s contempt motion and related legal documents are available online here.

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Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh describes ‘executive assassination ring’

March 14, 2009

By Eric Black

Global Research, March 12, 2009

Seymour Hersh

REUTERS/Fadi Al-AssaadJournalist Seymour Hersh speaking in Doha at an Al Jazeera forum on the media in 2007.

At a “Great Conversations” event at the University of Minnesota last night, legendary investigative reporter Seymour Hersh may have made a little more news than he intended by talking about new alleged instances of domestic spying by the CIA, and about an ongoing covert military operation that he called an “executive assassination ring.”

Hersh spoke with great confidence about these findings from his current reporting, which he hasn’t written about yet.

In an email exchange afterward, Hersh said that his statements were “an honest response to a question” from the event’s moderator, U of M Political Scientist Larry Jacobs and “not something I wanted to dwell about in public.”

Hersh didn’t take back the statements, which he said arise from reporting he is doing for a book, but that it might be a year or two before he has what he needs on the topic to be “effective…that is, empirical, for even the most skeptical.”

The evening of great conversation, featuring Walter Mondale and Hersh, moderated by Jacobs and titled “America’s Constitutional Crisis,” looked to be a mostly historical review of events that have tested our Constitution, by a journalist and a high government official who had experience with many of the crises.

And it was mostly historical, and a great conversation, in which Hersh and Mondale talked about the patterns by which presidents seem to get intoxicated by executive power, frustrated by the limitations on that power from Congress and the public, drawn into improper covert actions that exceed their constitutional powers, in the belief that they can get results and will never be found out. Despite a few references to the Founding Fathers, the history was mostly recent, starting with the Vietnam War with much of it arising from the George W. Bush administration, which both men roundly denounced.

At the end of one answer by Hersh about how these things tend to happen, Jacobs asked: “And do they continue to happen to this day?”

Replied Hersh:

“Yuh. After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without any legal authority for it. They haven’t been called on it yet. That does happen.

“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command — JSOC it’s called. It is a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days, they reported directly to the Cheney office. They did not report to the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff or to Mr. [Robert] Gates, the secretary of defense. They reported directly to him. …

“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring essentially, and it’s been going on and on and on. Just today in the Times there was a story that its leaders, a three star admiral named [William H.] McRaven, ordered a stop to it because there were so many collateral deaths.

“Under President Bush’s authority, they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them and leaving. That’s been going on, in the name of all of us.

“It’s complicated because the guys doing it are not murderers, and yet they are committing what we would normally call murder. It’s a very complicated issue. Because they are young men that went into the Special Forces. The Delta Forces you’ve heard about. Navy Seal teams. Highly specialized.

“In many cases, they were the best and the brightest. Really, no exaggerations. Really fine guys that went in to do the kind of necessary jobs that they think you need to do to protect America. And then they find themselves torturing people.

“I’ve had people say to me — five years ago, I had one say: ‘What do you call it when you interrogate somebody and you leave them bleeding and they don’t get any medical committee and two days later he dies. Is that murder? What happens if I get before a committee?’

“But they’re not gonna get before a committee.”

Hersh, the best-known investigative reporter of his generation, writes about these kinds of issues for The New Yorker. He has written often about JSOC, including, last July that:

“Under the Bush Administration’s interpretation of the law, clandestine military activities, unlike covert C.I.A. operations, do not need to be depicted in a Finding, because the President has a constitutional right to command combat forces in the field without congressional interference.”

(“Finding” refers to a special document that a president must issue, although not make public, to authorize covert CIA actions.)

Here is a tape of the full Mondale-Hersh-Jacobs colloquy, a little over an hour, without the audience Q and A. If you want to look for the Hersh statement quoted above, it’s about at the 7:30 mark.

The rest of the evening was, as expected, full of worry and wisdom and quite a bit of Bush-bashing.

Jacobs walked the two elder statesmen through their experiences of:

  • The My Lai massacre, which Hersh first revealed publicly and which he last night called “the end of innocence about us and war.”
  • The Pentagon Papers case, which Mondale called the best example of the “government’s potential for vast public deception.”
  • Henry Kissinger’s secret dealings, mostly relating to the Vietnam War. (Hersh, who has written volumes about Kissinger, said that he will always believe that whereas ordinary people count sheep to fall asleep, Kissinger “has to count burned and maimed Cambodian babies.”)
  • The Church Committee investigation of CIA and FBI abuses, in which Mondale played a major role. (He talked about the fact that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover not only spied on Martin Luther King but literally tried to drive him to suicide.)
  • The Iran Contra scandal. (Hersh said the Reagan administration came to office with a clear goal of finding a way to finance covert actions, such as the funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, without appropriations so that Congress wouldn’t know about them. Mondale noted that Reagan had signed a law barring further aid to the Contras, then participated in a scheme to keep the aid flowing. Hersh said that two key veterans of Iran-Contra, Dick Cheney and national security official Elliot Abrams, were reunited in the George W. Bush White House and decided that the key lesson from Iran-Contra was that too many people in the administration knew about it.)
  • And the Bush-Cheney years. (Said Hersh: “The contempt for Congress in the Bush-Cheney White House was extaordinary.” Said Mondale of his successor, Cheney, and his inner circle: “they ran a government within the government.” Hersh added: “Eight or nine neoconservatives took over our country.” Mondale said that the precedents of abuse of vice presidential power by Cheney would remain “like a loaded pistol that you leave on the dining room table.”)

Jacobs pressed both men on the question of whether the frequent abuses of power show that the Constitution fails, because these things keep happening, or whether it works, because these things keep coming to light.

Mondale stuck with the happy answer. “The system has come through again and again,” he said. Presidents always think they will get away with it, but eventually reporters like Hersh bring things to light, the public “starts smelling this stuff,” the courts and the Congress get involved. Presidents “always, in the long run, find out that the system is stronger than they are.”

Hersh seemed more troubled by the repetitions of the pattern. The “beautiful thing about our system” is that eventually we get new leaders, he said. “The evil twosome, Cheney and Bush, left,” Hersh said. But he also said “it’s really amazing to me that we manage to get such bad leadership, so consistently.”

And he added that both the press and the public let down their guard in the aftermath of 9/11.

“The major newspapers joined the [Bush] team,” Hersh said. Top editors passed the message to investigative reporters not to “pick holes” in what Bush was doing. Violations of the Bill of Rights happened in the plain sight of the public. It was not only tolerated, but Bush was re-elected.

And even Mondale admitted that one of his greatest successes, laws reforming the FBI and CIA in the aftermath of the Church Committee, were supposed to fix the problem so that “we would never have these problems again in the lifetime of anyone alive at the time, but of course we did.”

UPDATE: The CIA responds to Seymour Hersh (via MinnPost)

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CIA Confirms a Dozen Destroyed Interrogation Tapes Depicted Torture

March 7, 2009

By Jason Leopold | The Public Record, March 6, 2009

Heavily redacted government documents filed in a New York federal court Friday afternoon state the CIA destroyed 12 videotapes that specifically showed two detainees being tortured by interrogators, the first time the agency has disclosed the exact number of .

The documents were filed in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking documentary evidence on the Bush administration’s treatment of detainees. In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for destroying the videotapes, alleging the agency violated a court order requiring the immediate production or identify all records requested by the ACLU related to detainee treatment. That motion is still pending.

The videotaped interrogations, which were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, were destroyed in November 2005 after The Washington Post published a story exposing the CIA’s use of so-called “black site” prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects with techniques that were not legal on U.S. soil.

On Monday, the Justice Department revealed for the first time in court documents the CIA destroyed 92 videotapes – far more than previously known – to prevent disclosure of evidence revealing how the agency’s interrogators subjected “war on terror” detainees to waterboarding and other brutal methods.

The tape destruction has been the subject of a year-long criminal investigation by John Durham, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who was appointed special prosecutor last year by Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

According to Friday’s court documents, 90 tapes relate to one detainee and two tapes relate to another detainee. The detainees are said to be al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan in March 2002 and flown to a secret CIA prison site in Thailand where he was tortured in what has been called the Bush administration’s extraordinary rendition program. The other so-called “high-value” detainee whose interrogation was videotaped was identified as al-Nashiri. It is believed that all of the videotaped interrogations took place at secret CIA detention center in Thailand. (Please see this investigative report on how a newly published Justice Department legal memo authorizing extraordinary renditions was drafted exactly two weeks before Zubaydah’s capture).

In a letter filed Friday in U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin said a complete list of summaries, transcripts or memoranda related to the videotapes would be filed with the court by March 20. The CIA requested an extra two weeks, Dassin said, “because it is still searching and identifying the records at issue.”

However, “to date, the CIA is not aware of any transcripts of the destroyed videotapes,” Dassin wrote. An unredacted version of the inventory of the destroyed videotapes will only be made available for the ACLU to view behind closed doors in court.  “This inventory identifies the tapes and includes any descriptions that were written on the spine of the tapes.”

Dassin said much of the information the ACLU is seeking remains classified and still cannot be released publicly. Dassin said an unredacted version of the inventory of videotapes the CIA destroyed can be viewed “in camera” by the judge presiding over the case. Additionally, the identities of individuals who viewed the videotapes also remains classified.

Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU, said Friday the “government is needlessly withholding information about these tapes from the public, despite the fact that the CIA’s use of torture – including waterboarding – is no secret.”

“This new information only underscores the need for full and immediate disclosure of the CIA’s illegal interrogation methods,” Singh said. “The time has come for the CIA to be held accountable for flouting the rule of law.”

Dassin added that the CIA turned over to the ACLU additional unredacted pages of a highly-classified CIA inspector general’s report from 2004 that concluded the techniques used on the prisoners “appeared to constitute cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment, as defined by the International Convention Against Torture.”

In a little known Jan. 10, 2008 declaration in response to the ACLU’s contempt motion, the CIA provided some insight into the inspector general John Helgerson’s report and revealed that he viewed the torture tapes, which formed the basis for his still classified report on the CIA’s methods of interrogation.

“In January 2003, [Office of Inspector General] OIG initiated a special review of the CIA terrorist detention and interrogation program. This review was intended to evaluate CIA detention and interrogation activities, and was not initiated in response to an allegation of wrongdoing,” the declaration says. “During the course of the special review, OIG was notified of the existence of videotapes of the interrogations of detainees. OIG arranged with the NCS to review the videotapes at the overseas location where they were stored.

“OIG reviewed the videotapes at an overseas covert NCS facility in May 2003. After reviewing the videotapes, OIG did not take custody of the videotapes and they remained in the custody of NCS. Nor did OIG make or retain a copy of the videotapes for its files. At the conclusion of the special review in May 2004, OIG notified DOJ and other relevant oversight authorities of the review’s findings.”

Although the report remains classified, previously published news reports and books provided some insight into the report’s contents.

“In his report, Mr. Helgerson also raised concern about whether the use of the techniques could expose agency officers to legal liability,” according to a November 9, 2005, story in The New York Times published the same month the tapes were destroyed. “They said the report expressed skepticism about the Bush administration view that any ban on cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment under the treaty does not apply to CIA interrogations because they take place overseas on people who are not citizens of the United States.”

“The officials who described the report said it discussed particular techniques used by the CIA against particular prisoners, including about three dozen terror suspects being held by the agency in secret locations around the world,” The New York Times reported.”They said it referred in particular to the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is said to have organized the Sept. 11 attacks and who has been detained in a secret location by the CIA since he was captured in March 2003. Mr. Mohammed is among those believed to have been subjected to waterboarding, in which a prisoner is strapped to a board and made to believe he is drowning.”

According to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, it is also believed that the tapes were destroyed because Democratic members of Congress who were briefed about the tapes began asking questions about whether the interrogations were illegal.

“Further rattling the CIA was a request in May 2005 from Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to see over a hundred documents referred to in the earlier Inspector General’s report on detention inside the black prison sites,” Mayer wrote in her book “The Dark Side.” “Among the items Rockefeller specifically sought was a legal analysis of the CIA’s interrogation videotapes.

“Rockefeller wanted to know if the intelligence agency’s top lawyer believed that the waterboarding of [alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu] Zubayda and [alleged 9/11 mastermind] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as captured on the secret videotapes, was entirely legal. The CIA refused to provide the requested documents to Rockefeller. But the Democratic senator’s mention of the videotapes undoubtedly sent a shiver through the Agency, as did a second request the made for these documents to [former CIA Director Porter] Goss in September 2005.”

According to Mayer, ex-Vice President Dick Cheney stopped Helgerson from fully completing his investigation. That proves, Mayer contends, that as early as 2004 “the Vice President’s office was fully aware that there were allegations of serious wrongdoing in The [interrogation] Program.”

“Helgerson was summoned repeatedly to meet privately with Vice President Cheney” before his investigation was “stopped in its tracks.” Mayer said that Cheney’s interaction with Helgerson was “highly unusual.”

Cheney has admitted in several interviews before he exited the White House that he personally “signed off” on waterboarding three terrorist detainees and approved the “enhanced interrogation” of 33 detainees.

In October 2007, former CIA Director Michael Hayden ordered an investigation into Helgerson’s office, focusing on internal complaints that the inspector general was on “a crusade against those who have participated in controversial detention programs.”

Dassin said the additional pages from the inspector general’s report that were turned over the ACLU identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed.

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Bush’s executive tyranny

March 4, 2009
We need a citizens commission to investigate how far the Bush White House wanted to take executive power after 9/11.

Tim Rutten | Los Angeles Times, March 4, 2009

Just how close to the brink of executive tyranny did the United States come in the panic that swept George W. Bush’s administration after 9/11? The answer, it now seems clear, is that we came far closer than even staunch critics of the White House believed.

On Monday, the Obama administration released nine legal opinions produced for the Bush White House by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel shortly after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. That heretofore obscure office essentially serves as the president’s arbiter of what’s legal and what isn’t. Among other things, the memorandums issued by the office in 2001 asserted that Bush had the power to order the military to capture suspected terrorists on U.S. soil and to treat them as enemy combatants without any rights to due process.

In the course of such operations, according to the Office of Legal Counsel, the military was free to ignore 4th Amendment prohibitions on illegal search and seizure and to engage in warrantless wiretapping. 1st Amendment protections of free speech also could be suspended at the chief executive’s directive, according to these opinions, and the president has the power to abrogate any international treaty at will.

Other opinions asserted that the president, acting under his inherent powers as commander in chief, is free to ignore laws passed by Congress and cases decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, particularly on the treatment of “detainees.”

An opinion sent to the White House on Oct. 23, 2001, flatly stated that 1st Amendment “speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully. … The current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.” Less than a year later, this same office advised Bush that he was free to authorize the torture of suspected terrorists.

These opinions were largely the work of John Yoo — the UC Berkeley legal scholar who currently is a visiting professor at Chapman University School of Law in Orange County — and a relatively small cadre of like-minded conservative lawyers. Many were passionate advocates of a marginal constitutional theory called “unitary executive,” which holds that — when it comes to matters of national security — the president is free to exercise virtually unfettered powers as an inherent aspect of his constitutional duty to act as commander in chief.

Suffice it to say that the arguments and precedents marshaled on behalf of this notion about the balance of powers give new weight to the adjective “attenuated.” In fact, what comes most readily to mind is the style of Talmudic argument called pilpul, in which texts and precedents are tortured out of context to arrive at a predetermined conclusion.

That, however, never bothered then-Vice President Dick Cheney and his ally, then-Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who brought to the Bush administration an abiding conviction that, since the Ford administration in which they both had served, U.S. presidents had suffered a disastrous erosion of executive power. Though neither man is a lawyer, both had become enthusiastic proponents of the unitary executive theory during their years out of power.

What Cheney and Rumsfeld understood better than most was that a few well-placed zealots with hands on critical levers — such as those in the Office of Legal Counsel — can send even the federal government spinning in new directions.

They came perilously close to doing that in the frantic and fearful months after 9/11, though the record must reflect that their first and firmest opponents were other conservative lawyers who found what was being proposed horrifying. Jack Goldsmith, who headed the Office of Legal Counsel after Yoo was gone and who repudiated many of the office’s earlier opinions, was one of those. So too was then-Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft, nobody’s idea of a civil libertarian.

Understanding how all this occurred, as well as how the CIA came to destroy 92 videotapes of the torture and incarceration it carried out under the authority of the Yoo memos, is vital. The problem is that ordinary congressional hearings would inevitably be attacked as partisan. And we don’t need a witch-hunt or a series of prosecutions of CIA officers who were following orders they’d been told were based on legal opinions from the Department of Justice.

That’s why Congress should take up the suggestion of Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.) and establish a bipartisan citizens commission to investigate and report on exactly what occurred. We need to understand just how close fear and over- weening ambition took us to executive tyranny.

timothy.rutten@latimes.com

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CIA destroyed 92 torture videos

March 3, 2009

By Jason Leopold | Consortiumnews.com, March 2, 2009

The CIA destroyed 92 videotapes – far more than previously known – to prevent disclosure of evidence revealing how the agency’s interrogators subjected “war on terror” detainees to waterboarding and other brutal methods, according to court documents filed by the Justice Department.

“The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed,” said a letter written by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin and filed in federal court in New York. “Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed.”

Previously, the CIA had disclosed that it had destroyed two videotapes and one audiotape of harsh interrogations of detainees. The tape destruction has been the subject of a year-long criminal investigation by John Durham, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who was appointed special prosecutor last year by Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

In Monday’s filing, Dassin noted that a stay of a contempt motion filed by the ACLU seeking release of the tapes was allowed to expire on Feb. 28 without a request for a continuation – signaling that Durham’s investigation is now complete.

In January, Durham had indicated in a court filing that he expected to wrap up his probe by the end of February. The CIA has asked the court to give the agency until Friday to produce a list of all destroyed records, any memos relating to reconstruction of those records, and identification of witnesses who may have watched the videotapes before they were destroyed.

Dassin’s letter said some information sought by the ACLU may be classified or “protected from disclosure, such as the names of the CIA employees who viewed the videotapes.”

Dassin said the CIA “intends to produce all of the information requested to the court and to produce as much information as possible on the public record to the plaintiffs.”

Amrit Singh, a staff attorney with the ACLU, said the latest disclosure “provides further evidence for holding the CIA in contempt of court.”

“The large number of videotapes destroyed confirms that the agency engaged in a systemic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations and to evade the court’s order.” Singh said. “Our contempt motion has been pending in court for over a year now – it is time to hold the CIA accountable for its flagrant disregard for the rule of law.”

The videotaped interrogations, which were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, were destroyed in November 2005 after The Washington Post published a story exposing the CIA’s use of so-called “black site” prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects with techniques that were not legal on U.S. soil.

The Zubaydah Case

The Post’s story focused on alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah and the harsh methods that the CIA used on him and other detainees. Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, and reportedly was whisked to a secret prison site in Thailand for interrogation.

Initially, Zubaydah was somewhat cooperative but later became tight-lipped when asked about alleged terrorist plots against the United States and the whereabouts of high-level al-Qaeda operatives.

In July 2002, a meeting was convened at the White House, where former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, Justice Department attorney John Yoo, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney’s attorney David Addington, and unknown CIA officials discussed whether the CIA could interrogate Zubaydah more aggressively in order to get him to respond.

It was at this July 2002 meeting that Yoo, Gonzales and Addington gave the CIA the green light to use a wide variety of techniques, including waterboarding, on Zubaydah and other detainees at several secret prisons to “break” them and force them to cooperate with interrogators, according to an account published in Newsweek in late December 2003.

Less than a month after the meeting, on Aug. 1, 2002, Yoo drafted a memo to Gonzales that was signed by Jay Bybee, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel. That memo declared that President Bush had the legal authority to allow CIA interrogators to employ harsh tactics to extract information from detainees.

Yoo’s memo – often called the “torture meme” – said Congress “may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, reportedly advised the CIA General Counsel Scott Muller and his deputy, John Rizzo, that the Aug.  1, 2002, legal opinion protected CIA interrogators from prosecution if they used waterboarding or other harsh tactics.

In February 2005, during his Senate confirmation hearing to become Homeland Security secretary, Chertoff said he provided the CIA broad guidance in response to its questions about interrogation methods but never addressed the legality of specific techniques.

Bush Fixated

In the book The One Percent Doctrine, author Ron Suskind said Zubaydah was not the “high-value detainee” the CIA had claimed. Rather, Zubaydah was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates and their families, Suskind wrote.

However, “Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote. Bush asked one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

Zubaydah was strapped to a waterboard and, fearing imminent death, he spoke about a wide range of plots against a number of U.S. targets, such as shopping malls, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. Yet, Suskind wrote, the information Zubaydah provided under duress was not credible.

According to Suskind, Zubaydah’s captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind wrote.

Still, in public statements, President Bush portrayed Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States” and added: “So, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures” to get Zubaydah to talk.

The President did not want to “lose face” because he had stated his importance publicly, Suskind wrote.

Last year, Mukasey appointed U.S. Attorney Durham as special counsel to investigate whether the destruction of the CIA videotapes violated any laws, but did not give Durham the authority to probe whether the interrogation techniques themselves violated anti-torture laws.

In December 2008, Bush and Cheney both admitted in exit interviews that they authorized the waterboarding of Zubaydah and two other detainees.

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers in January proposed expanding the scope of Durham’s investigation to include a broader review of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies.

Conyers said he urged Attorney General Eric Holder to “appoint a Special Counsel or expand the scope of the present investigation into CIA tape destruction to determine whether there were criminal violations committed pursuant to Bush administration policies that were undertaken under unreviewable war powers, including enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless domestic surveillance.”

The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Democrat Dianne Feinstein, will soon conduct a secret investigation into the CIA’s interrogation program to determine whether the methods used against detainees worked, according to published reports.

Jason Leopold has launched his own Web site, The Public Record, at www.pubrecord.org.

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UK Defence Seretary: We did hand over terror suspects for rendition

February 27, 2009

Defence Secretary sorry for misleading statements made by ministers

By Kim Sengupta

The Independent, uk, Friday, 27 February 2009

Defence Secretary John Hutton speaking in the House of Commons yesterdayDefence Secretary John Hutton speaking in the House of Commons yesterday

The British Government admitted for the first time yesterday that it had been involved in “extraordinary rendition”. The Defence Secretary John Hutton disclosed that terror suspects handed over to the US in Iraq were flown out of the country for interrogation.

Contradicting previous insistences by the Government that it had no played no part in the controversial practice, John Hutton revealed that details of the cases were known by officials and detailed in documents sent to two cabinet members at the time – Home Secretary Charles Clarke and Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.

The prisoners, two men of Pakistani origin who were members of the Lashkar-e-Toiba group, which is said to be affiliated to al-Qa’ida, were captured by SAS troops serving near Baghdad in February 2004. They were handed over to US custody and flown to Afghanistan within the next few months. Among other inmates who passed through the prison was Binyam Mohammed, the UK citizen recently freed from Guantanamo Bay.

Mr Hutton apologised to the Commons “unreservedly” for misleading statements made by the Government in the past, adding “in retrospect, it is clear to me that the transfer to Afghanistan of these two individuals should have been questioned at the time”.

Yesterday, Mr Clarke said he had nothing to add. A spokesman for Mr Straw said “passing references” were made to the cases in documents but he “was not alerted to the specific cases at the time”.

There were immediate calls for an inquiry. The former shadow Home Secretary David Davis said the case was the “latest in a series of issues where the Government has been less than straightforward with regard to allegations of torture”.

A fellow Tory MP, Crispin Blunt, asked why the transfer had not been more fully investigated in 2004, adding: “It is at the very least unfortunate that both officials and ministers overlooked the significance of these cases, not least since the issue of rendition was already highly controversial … The country is owed an account of what happened – nothing does more to undermine our fight against terrorism and violence [than] if we depart from the rule of law and the values we seek to defend.”

Last night, Liberal Democrat peer Baroness Ludford – who led an EU-wide inquiry into rendition in 2007 – said the admission was “another breach in the wall of denials and cover-ups”. She said there was further evidence of 170 stopovers at UK airports by CIA-operated aircraft flying to or from countries where prisoners could be tortured.

The Defence Secretary said the two men continue to be held in Afghanistan as “unlawful enemy combatants” and their status is reviewed on a regular basis. There was no “substantial evidence” he continued, that they had been mistreated or subjected to abuse.

However, a report released by Human Rights Watch in 2004 accused American forces in Afghanistan of inflicting “illegal and abusive treatment” on inmates. Members of the US Congress also alleged mistreatment, with Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy saying some inmates had died. The International Committee of the Red Cross issued a formal complaint to the US in 2007.

Mr Hutton told MPs there had been a number of other errors in previous statements to the Commons, including the number of prisoners held by the UK in Iraq, where ministers “overstated by approximately 1,000 the numbers of detainees held by UK forces”.

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Obama expands US military intervention in Pakistan

February 25, 2009
by Barry Grey
Global Research, February 23, 2009
World Socialist Web Site

The Obama administration is significantly expanding the US military role in Pakistan beyond that pursued by the Bush administration, directly employing US military force against anti-government Pakistani guerrillas involved only marginally, if at all, in attacks on US forces in neighboring Afghanistan, according to a recent article in the New York Times.

The article, entitled “Obama Expands Missile Strikes Inside Pakistan” and authored by Mark Mazzetti and White House correspondent David E. Sanger, cites two separate missile strikes inside Pakistan carried out February 14 and February 16 as evidence that “the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.”

The Times reports that the strikes, carried out by drone aircraft, are the first to target alleged training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud, an Islamist insurgent leader identified early last year by both American and Pakistani officials as the orchestrator of the assassination of then-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, the wife of Pakistan’s current president and Pakistan People’s Party leader Asif Ali Zardari.

“Under President Bush,” the article states, “the United States frequently attacked militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban involved in cross-border attacks in Afghanistan, but had stopped short of raids aimed at Mr. Mehsud and his followers, who have played less of a direct role in attacks on American troops.”

As the article indicates, the missile strikes on Mehsud’s forces represent a qualitative expansion of the US war in the region, with the American military now directly intervening into internal Pakistani conflicts to bolster Washington’s client regime in Islamabad.

The strikes against Mehsud came in the same week that Obama announced a major military escalation in Afghanistan, ordering an additional 17,000 US troops into the country. They also came within days of talks in Pakistan between top political, military and intelligence officials there and Richard Holbrooke, Obama’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. Holbrooke also met with officials in Afghanistan and India.

The Times notes that in a telephone interview last Friday, Holbrooke declined to comment on the strikes against Mehsud, and that the White House and the CIA similarly refused to comment.

The newspaper reports that Bush had included Mehsud’s name “in a classified list of military leaders whom the CIA and American commandos were authorized to capture or kill.” It says the February 14 strike was aimed “specifically” at Mehsud, but failed to kill him. The February 16 raid, it states, targeted a camp run by a top aide to Mehsud. Earlier reports said each of the strikes killed 30 people.

The article continues: “For months, Pakistani military and intelligence officials have complained about Washington’s refusal to strike at Baitullah Mehsud, even while CIA drones struck at Qaeda figures and leaders of the network run by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a militant leader believed responsible for a campaign of violence against American troops in Afghanistan.”

The article suggests that the US has initiated attacks on Mehsud and his followers, in part, to induce the Pakistani regime to intensify its military operations against Taliban, Al Qaeda and other Islamist insurgent groups based in Pakistani tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan. “By striking at the Mehsud network,” it states, “the United States may be seeking to demonstrate to Mr. Zardari that the new administration is willing to go after the insurgents of greatest concern to the Pakistani leader.”

It then alludes to the deteriorating military and security situation of the Pakistani regime, which faces growing insurgencies in tribal regions that border on Afghanistan as well as the Taliban takeover of the Swat Valley in the more settled North West Frontier Province, and suggests that “American officials may also be prompted by growing concern that the militant attacks are increasingly putting the civilian government of Pakistan, a nation with nuclear weapons, at risk.”

The Times article also states that the US is continuing to carry out Special Forces operations on the ground inside Pakistan, in addition to its stepped-up missile attacks. Last September, US Special Forces troops attacked a Pakistani village in South Waziristan, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the Pakistani northwest border region with Afghanistan, killing between 15 and 20 people, including women and children.

That assault, the first clear case of an attack by US ground troops inside Pakistani territory, evoked condemnations from the government in Islamabad. According to the February 21 Times article however, “American Special Operations troops based in Afghanistan have also carried out a number of operations into Pakistan’s tribal areas since early September, when a commando raid that killed a number of militants was publicly condemned by Pakistani officials. According to a senior American military official, the commando missions since September have been primarily to gather intelligence.”

Additional evidence of a major extension of the US war into Pakistan is the revelation that at least some of the US drones used to fire missiles into Pakistani border regions, killing scores of civilians are inflaming local anger, are operating from a base inside Pakistan itself. Earlier this month, Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, spoke of the existence of the base at a Senate hearing. The Pakistani government has denied the existence of the base, but the London Times and the Pakistani News have both published Google Earth images of three drones parked at the Shamsi air field in southwestern Pakistan.

Obama has made it clear that his administration’s response to the growth of insurgent Afghan forces and the worsening security situation facing the US and its puppet regime in Afghanistan, as well as the growing strength of anti-US and anti-government insurgents in Pakistan, is an expansion of American military violence both in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The White House and the military are treating both countries as part of a single military theater.

The administration is conducting a review of its strategy in the region, which is to be completed by the beginning of April. This week, the US is hosting a high-level conference in Washington on the Afghan-Pakistan border region, which will be attended by Gates, Holbrooke, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Pakistan is sending its foreign minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, its army chief, Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and the head of its military intelligence service, Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha. Afghanistan is sending foreign minister Rangeen Dadfar Spanta.

However, Obama, Gates and the military chiefs have already outlined a policy shift away from any pretense of democratic reform or “nation-building” in favor of a more concentrated focus on counter-insurgency operations aimed at wiping out popular resistance in both Afghanistan and Pakistan to US neo-colonial aims.

One issue to be discussed at the Washington conference this week is US concerns over a cease-fire agreement announced last week by the Pakistani government with Taliban insurgents in the Swat Valley.

As indicated by the actions taken in the five weeks since Obama’s inauguration, the US in embarked on a military escalation that will involve an even greater toll in Afghan and Pakistani lives as well as US casualties. So far, 26 American soldiers and 13 from other “coalition” countries have been killed in Afghanistan this year, almost twice as many as in the first two months of 2008, according to the web site iCasualties.org.

Last Wednesday, the day after Obama announced the dispatch of 17,000 additional US troops to Afghanistan, the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, held a press conference in which he called for 10,000 more troops beyond the 17,000 ordered so far by Obama. McKiernan said the additional troops did not represent a “temporary force uplift” but part of an expanded war that will continue for at least “three to four to five years.” Some foreign policy analysts are predicting that US troop levels in the region will eventually rise to 100,000.

In 2001, Washington used the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to put into action long-developed plans to conquer Afghanistan and use it as a base to establish US hegemony in Central Asia, home to some of the richest deposits of oil and natural gas in the world. The inevitable result was a military disaster and the destabilization of the entire region.

Now, in pursuit of the same imperialist aims, the Obama administration is launching a major escalation that will only further destabilize the region, intensify tensions with rival power such as China and Russia, and cause untold death and destruction. There is a growing danger of a military conflagration throughout Central Asia and beyond.

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CIA secretly using Pakistan base for drone raids

February 18, 2009

From The Times
February 17, 2009

Secrecy and denial as Pakistan lets CIA use airbase to strike militants

A Veronique De Viguerie drone in Afhganistan

The Pakistani Government has also repeatedly demanded that the US halt drone attacks

The CIA is secretly using an airbase in southern Pakistan to launch the Predator drones that observe and attack al-Qaeda and Taleban militants on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan, a Times investigation has found.

The Pakistani and US governments have repeatedly denied that Washington is running military operations, covert or otherwise, on Pakistani territory — a hugely sensitive issue in the predominantly Muslim country.

The Pakistani Government has also repeatedly demanded that the US halt drone attacks on northern tribal areas that it says have caused hundreds of civilian casualties and fuelled anti-American sentiment.

But The Times has discovered that the CIA has been using the Shamsi airfield — originally built by Arab sheikhs for falconry expeditions in the southwestern province of Baluchistan — for at least a year. The strip, which is about 30 miles from the Afghan border, allows US forces to launch a Drone within minutes of receiving actionable intelligence as well as allowing them to attack targets further afield.

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It was known that US special forces used Shamsi during the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, but the Pakistani Government declared publicly in 2006 that the Americans had left it and two other airbases.

Key to the Times investigation is the unexplained delivery of 730,000 gallons of F34 aviation fuel to Shamsi. Details were found on the website of the Pentagon’s fuel procurement agency.

The Defence Energy Support Centre site shows that a civilian company, Nordic Camp Supply (NCS), was contracted to deliver the fuel, worth $3.2 million, from Pakistan Refineries near Karachi.

It also shows the fuel was delivered last year, when the United States escalated drone attacks on Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas, allegedly killing several top Taleban and al-Qaeda targets, but also many civilians.

A source at NCS, which is based in Denmark, confirmed that the company had been awarded the contract and had supplied the fuel to Shamsi, but declined to give further details.

A spokesman for the US embassy in Pakistan told The Times: “Shamsi is not the final destination.” However, he declined to elaborate and denied that the US was using it as a base.

“No. No. No. No. No. We unequivocally and emphatically can tell you that there is no basing of US troops in Pakistan,” he said. “There is no basing of US Air Force, Navy, Marines, Army, none, on the record and emphatically. I want that to be very clear. And that is the answer any way you want to put it. There is no base here, no troops billeted. We do not operate here.”

He said that he could not comment on CIA operations.

The CIA declined to comment, as did the Pentagon. But one senior Western source familiar with US operations in Pakistan and Afghanistan told The Times that the CIA “runs Predator flights routinely” from Shamsi.

“We can see the planes flying from the base,” said Safar Khan, a local journalist. “The area around the base is a high-security zone and no one is allowed there.”

He said that the outer perimeter of Shamsi was guarded by Pakistani military, but the airfield itself was under the control of American forces.

Shamsi lies in a sparsely populated area about 190 miles southwest of the city of Quetta, which US intelligence officials believe is used as a staging post by senior Taleban leaders, including Mullah Omar. It is also 100 miles south of the border with Afghanistan’s southern province of Helmand and about 100 miles east of the border with Iran.

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That would put the Predators, which have a range of more than 2,000 miles and can fly for 29 hours, within reach of militants in Baluchistan, southern Afghanistan and in Pakistan’s northern tribal areas.

Paul Smyth, head of operational studies at the Royal United Services Institute, said that 730,000 gallons of F34, also known as JP8, was not enough to supply regular Hercules tanker flights but was sufficient to sustain drones or helicopters.

Other experts said that Shamsi’s airstrip was too short for most aircraft, but was big enough for Predators and ideally located as there were few civilians in the surrounding area to witness the drones coming and going.

Farhatullah Babar, a spokesman for the President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari, said that he did not know anything about the airfield. However, Major General Athar Abbas, the chief military spokesman, confirmed that US forces were using Shamsi. “The airfield is being used only for logistics,” he said, without elaborating.

He added that the Americans were also using another airbase near Jacobabad, 300 miles northeast of Karachi, for logistics and military operations.

Pakistan gave America permission to use Shamsi, Jacobabad and two other bases — Pasni and Dalbadin — for the invasion of Afghanistan in October 2001. US Marine Special Forces were based at Shamsi and, in January 2002, a US Marine KC130 tanker aircraft crashed close to its runway, killing seven Marines on board.

Jacobabad became the main US airbase until Bagram, near Kabul, was repaired, while Pasni, on the coast, was used for helicopters and Dalbadin as a refueling post for special forces’ helicopters. However, in December 2001, Pakistan began sharing Jacobabad and Pasni with US forces as India and Pakistan began massing troops on their border. In July 2006 the Pakistani Government declared that America was no longer using Shamsi, Pasni and Jacobabad, although they were at its disposal in an emergency.

The subject has become particularly sensitive in the past few weeks as President Obama has made it clear that he will continue the strikes while reviewing overall US strategy in the region.

The latest strike on Monday — the fourth since Mr Obama took office — killed 31 people in the tribal agency of Kurram, and another on Saturday killed 25 people in South Waziristan, according to Pakistani officials.

Shah Mehmood Qureshi, the Pakistani Foreign Minister, responded on Sunday by categorically denying that Pakistani bases were used for US drone attacks.

Aerial assault

— Armed predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have been in use since 1999

— The aircraft is controlled from the ground using satellite systems and onboard cameras

— The MQ9 craft, which is used in Afghanistan, is 11m long, has a 20m wing span and a cruise speed of up to 230mph. Each can carry four Hellfire missiles and two bombs

— Three systems were bought by the RAF last year for £500m

Sources: Jane’s Information, US Airforce, RAF, Times archives

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A Call to End All Renditions

February 11, 2009

JURIST –  Forum

JURIST Contributing Editor Marjorie Cohn of Thomas Jefferson School of Law says that instead of leaving the door open for the CIA to continue to engage in the rendition of terrorism suspects to other countries so long as the process is somehow handled “humanely”, the Obama administration should end renditions altogether and prosecute those who have ordered renditions since 2001…

Binyam Mohamed, an Ethiopian residing in Britain, said he was tortured after being sent to Morocco and Afghanistan in 2002 by the U.S. government. Mohamed was transferred to Guantánamo in 2004 and all terrorism charges against him were dismissed last year. Mohamed was a victim of extraordinary rendition, in which a person is abducted without any legal proceedings and transferred to a foreign country for detention and interrogation, often tortured.

Mohamed and four other plaintiffs are accusing Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc. of flying them to other countries and secret CIA camps where they were tortured. In Mohamed’s case, two British justices accused the Bush administration of pressuring the British government to block the release of evidence that was “relevant to allegations of torture” of Mohamed.

Twenty-five lines edited out of the court documents included details about how Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel as well as other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding “is very far down the list of things they did,” according to a British official quoted by the Telegraph (UK).

The plaintiffs’ complaint quotes a former Jeppesen employee as saying, “We do all of the extraordinary rendition flights – you know, the torture flights.” A senior company official also apparently admitted the company transported people to countries where they would be tortured.

Obama’s Justice Department appeared before a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals Monday in the Jeppesen lawsuit. But instead of making a clean break with the dark policies of the Bush years, the Obama administration claimed the same “state secrets” privilege that Bush used to block inquiry into his policies of torture and illegal surveillance. Claiming that the extraordinary rendition program is a state secret is disingenuous since it is has been extensively documented in the media.

“This was an opportunity for the new administration to act on its condemnation of torture and rendition, but instead it has chosen to stay the course,” said the ACLU’s Ben Wizner, counsel for the five men.

If the judges accept Obama’s state secrets claim, these men will be denied their day in court and precluded from any recovery for the damages they suffered as a result of extraordinary rendition.

Two and a half weeks before Obama’s representative appeared in the Jeppesen case, the new President had signed Executive Order 13491. It established a special task force “to study and evaluate the practices of transferring individuals to other nations in order to ensure that such practices comply with the domestic laws, international obligations, and policies of the United States and do not result in the transfer of individuals to other nations to face torture or otherwise for the purpose, or with the effect, of undermining or circumventing the commitments or obligations of the United States to ensure the humane treatment of individuals in its custody or control.”

This order prohibits extraordinary rendition. It also ensures humane treatment of persons in U.S. custody or control. But it doesn’t specifically guarantee that prisoners the United States renders to other countries will be free from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment that doesn’t amount to torture. It does, however, aim to ensure that our government’s practices of transferring people to other countries complies with U.S. laws and policies, including our obligations under international law.

One of those laws is the International Covenant on Civil Political Rights (ICCPR), a treaty the United States ratified in 1992. Article 7 of the ICCPR prohibits the States Parties from subjecting persons “to torture or to cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.” The UN Human Rights Committee, which is the body that monitors the ICCPR, has interpreted that prohibition to forbid States Parties from exposing “individuals to the danger of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment upon return to another country by way of their extradition, expulsion or refoulement.”

Order 13491 also mandates, “The CIA shall close as expeditiously as possible any detention facilities that it currently operates and shall not operate any such detention facility in the future.” The order does not define “expeditiously” and the definitional section of the order says that the terms ‘detention facilities’ and ‘detention facility’ “do not refer to facilities used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis.” Once again, “short term” and “transitory” are not defined.

In his confirmation hearing, Attorney General Eric Holder categorically stated that the United States should not turn over an individual to a country where we have reason to believe he will be tortured. Leon Panetta, nominee for CIA director, went further last week and interpreted Order 13491 as forbidding “that kind of extraordinary rendition, where we send someone for the purposes of torture or for actions by another country that violate our human values.”

But alarmingly, Panetta appeared to champion the same standard used by the Bush administration, which reportedly engaged in extraordinary rendition 100 to 150 times as of March 2005. After September 11, 2001, President Bush issued a classified directive that expanded the CIA’s authority to render terrorist suspects to other States. Former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the CIA and the State Department received assurances that prisoners will be treated humanely. “I will seek the same kinds of assurances that they will not be treated inhumanely,” Panetta told the senators.

Gonzales had admitted, however, “We can’t fully control what that country might do. We obviously expect a country to whom we have rendered a detainee to comply with their representations to us . . . If you’re asking me, ‘Does a country always comply?’ I don’t have an answer to that.”

The answer is no. Binyam Mohamed’s case is apparently the tip of the iceberg. Maher Arar, a Canadian born in Syria, was apprehended by U.S. authorities in New York on September 26, 2002, and transported to Syria, where he was brutally tortured for months. Arar used an Arabic expression to describe the pain he experienced: “you forget the milk that you have been fed from the breast of your mother.” The Canadian government later exonerated Arar of any terrorist ties. In another instance, thirteen CIA operatives were arrested in Italy for kidnapping an Egyptian, Abu Omar, in Milan and transporting him to Cairo where he was tortured.

Panetta made clear that the CIA will continue to engage in rendition to detain and interrogate terrorism suspects and transfer them to other countries. “If we capture a high-value prisoner,” he said, “I believe we have the right to hold that individual temporarily to be able to debrief that individual and make sure that individual is properly incarcerated.” No clarification of how long is “temporarily” or what “debrief” would mean.

When Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.) asked about the Clinton administration’s use of the CIA to transfer prisoners to countries where they were later executed, Panetta replied, “I think that is an appropriate use of rendition.” Jane Mayer, columnist for the New Yorker, has documented numerous instances of extraordinary rendition during the Clinton administration, including cases in which suspects were executed in the country to which the United States had rendered them. Once when Richard Clarke, President Clinton’s chief counter-terrorism adviser on the National Security Council, “proposed a snatch,” Vice-President Al Gore said, “That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.”

There is a slippery slope between ordinary rendition and extraordinary rendition. “Rendition has to end,” Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, recently told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now!: “Rendition is a violation of sovereignty. It’s a kidnapping. It’s force and violence.” Ratner queried whether Cuba could enter the United States and take Luis Posada, the man responsible for blowing up a commercial Cuban airline in 1976 and killing 73 people. Or whether the United States could go down to Cuba and kidnap Assata Shakur, who escaped a murder charge in New Jersey.

Moreover, “renditions for the most part weren’t very productive,” a former CIA official told the Los Angeles Times. After a prisoner was turned over to authorities in Egypt, Jordan or another country, the CIA had very little influence over how prisoners were treated and whether they were ultimately released.

The U.S. government should disclose the identities, fate, and current whereabouts of all persons detained by the CIA or rendered to foreign custody by the CIA since 2001. Those who ordered renditions should be prosecuted. And the special task force should recommend, and Obama should agree to, an end to all renditions.

Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and president of the National Lawyers Guild. She is the author of Cowboy Republic: Six Ways the Bush Gang Has Defied the Law. Her new book, Rules of Disengagement: The Politics and Honor of Military Dissent (with Kathleen Gilberd), will be published in April 2009. Her articles are archived at http://www.marjoriecohn.com.

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