What Is Probably in the Missing Tapes

To judge from firsthand documents obtained by the ACLU through a FOIA lawsuit, we can guess what is probably on the missing CIA interrogation tapes -- as well as understand why those implicated are spinning so hard to pretend the tapes do not document a series of evident crimes. According to the little-noticed but extraordinarily important book Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond (Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, Columbia University Press, New York 2007), which presents dozens of original formerly secret documents - FBI emails and memos, letters and interrogator "wish lists," raw proof of the systemic illegal torture of detainees in various US-held prisons -- the typical "harsh interrogation" of a suspect in US custody reads like an account of abuses in archives at Yad Vashem.

More is still being hidden as of this writing -- as those in Congress now considering whether a special prosecutor is needed in this case should be urgently aware: "Through the FOIA lawsuit," write the authors, "we learned of the existence of multiple records relating to prisoner abuse that still have not been released by the administration; credible media reports identify others. As this book goes to print, the Bush administration is still withholding, among many other records, a September 2001 presidential directive authorizing the CIA to set up secret detention centers overseas; an August 2002 Justice Department memorandum advising the CIA about the lawfulness of waterboarding [Italics mine; nota bene, Mr. Mukasey] and other aggressive interrogation methods; documents describing interrogation methods used by special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; investigative files concerning the deaths of prisoners in U.S. custody; and numerous photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners at detention facilities other than Abu Ghraib.'

What we are likely to see if the tapes documenting the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri are ever recovered is that the "confessions" of the prisoners upon which the White House has built its entire case for subverting the Constitution and suspending civil liberties in this country was obtained through methods such as electrocution, beating to the point of organ failure, hanging prisoners from the wrists from a ceiling, suffocation, and threats against family members ("I am going to find your mother and I am going to fuck her" is one direct quote from a US interrogator). On the missing tapes, we would likely see responses from the prisoners that would be obvious to us as confessions to anything at all in order to end the violence. In other words, if we could witness the drama of manufacturing by torture the many violently coerced "confessions" upon which the whole house of cards of this White House and its hyped "war on terror" rests, it would likely cause us to reopen every investigation, including the most serious ones (remember, even the 9/11 committee did not receive copies of the tapes); shut down the corrupt, Stalinesque Military Commissions System; turn over prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, into a working, accountable justice system operating in accordance with American values; and direct our legal scrutiny to the torturers themselves -- right up to the office of the Vice President and the President if that is where the investigations would lead.

By the way: "The prohibition against torture [in the law] is considered to be a jus cogens norm, meaning that no derogation is permitted from it under any circumstances."

This is what the FOIA documents report, belying White House soundbites that "we don't torture" and explaining the intent pursuit on the part of the CIA and the White House of the current apparent obstruction of justice:

Late 2002 -- the FBI objects to the illegality of abuses being put into place by the Defense Department in its "special interrogation plan" to use isolation, sleep deprivation and menacing with dogs against prisoners.

Dec 2, 2002 -- Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally issues a directive authorizing the use of stress positions, hooding, removal of clothing, and the terrorizing of inmates at Guantanamo with dogs.

Dec 3, 2002 -- at Baghram, interrogators kill an Afghan prisoner "by shackling him by his wrists to the wire ceiling above his cell and repeatedly beating his legs. A postmortem report finds abrasions and contusions on the prisoner's face, head, neck, arms and legs and determines that the death was a "homicide" caused by "blunt force injuries."

April 16, 2003 -- Rumsfeld approves yet another directive for abusive interrogation.

This directive for Afghanistan restores to the interrogators' arsenal many forms of torture that had been resisted by the FBI. [Notably, the FBI had resisted complying with the direct commission of torture since as early as 2002 because, as its Behavioral Analysis Unit complained to the Defense Department at that time in an internal email, "not only are these tactics at odds with legally permissible interviewing techniques [italics mine: in other words, all concerned know these are apparent war crimes]...but they are being employed by personnel in GTMO who have little, if any, experience eliciting information for judicial purposes." In other words, as any trained interrogator knows, the abuses are both doubtless illegal and certainly ineffective for getting real intelligence. [Jaffer and Singh, Timeline of Key Events, pp. 45-65,op. cit.]

Oct 22 2003 -- Final autopsy report relating to death of "52 y/o Iraqi Male, Civilian Detainee" held by U.S. forces in Nasiriyah, Iraq. Prisoner was found to have "died as a result of asphyxia...due to strangulation."

November 14, 2003 -- a sworn statement of a soldier stationed at Camp Red, Baghdad, states that "I saw what I think were war crimes" and that "the chain of command....allowed them to happen."

May 13, 2004 -- a sworn statement of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion recounts an incident in which "interrogators abused 17-year-old son of prisoner in order to 'break' the prisoner."

May 18, 2004 -- a Privacy Act statement of an Abu Ghraib sergeant notes that prisoners had been forced to stand "naked with a bag over their head, standing on MRE boxes and their hand[s] spread out...holding a bottle in each hand."

May 24, 2004 -- Sworn statement of interrogator who arrived at Abu Ghraib in October 2003, discussing use of military dogs against juvenile prisoners.

June 16, 2004 -- Marine Corps document describing abuse cases between September 2001 and June 2004, including "substantiated" incidents in which marines electrocuted a prisoner and set another's hands on fire.

Undated: Sworn statement of screener who arrived at Abu Ghraib in September 2003, indicating that prisoners at Asamiya Palace in Baghdad had been beaten, burned and subjected to electric shocks.

Subsequent internal documents record prisoners being stripped, made to walk into walls blindfolded, punched, kicked, dragged about the room, observed to have bruises and burn marks on their backs, and having their jaws deliberately broken. Still other reports document further incidents classified by the military itself as probable murders committed by US interrogators.

The book also reveals an extraordinary original transcript of a Dept. of the Army Inspector General interview with Lieutenant General Randall Marc Schmidt. Lt. Gen. Schmidt had interfaced with MG Geoffrey Miller on the one hand -- the most brutal overseer of such abuses, the one who was sent to "Gitmo-ize" other prisons -- and the honorable JAG military lawyers on the other hand, over the abuses under investigation at that time. [Lt. Gen. Schmidt advised MG Miller of his rights under Article 31 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice at that time -- in other words, those involved know something serious is at stake, p. a-16].

The transcript of this internal document reveals Lt. Gen. Schmidt's own words that it was his understanding that the directives to commit these acts, many of which are apparently war crimes, came right from the top.

The interview was not primarily intended to be a public document:

"An Inspector General" notes the document, "is an impartial fact-finder for the Directing Authority Testimony taken by an IG and reports based on that testimony may be used for official purposes. Access is normally restricted to persons who clearly need the information to perform their official duties. [italics mine]. In some cases, disclosure to other persons may be required by law or regulation or may be directed by proper authority." As in the case, clearly, here -- though the immense implications of this privately taken testimony have not reverberated fully yet in a public forum: "I thought the Secretary of Defense in good faith was approving techniques," testified Lt. Gen. Schmidt. "In good faith after talking to him twice. I know that -- and these weren't interrogations or interviews of him. This was our hour and forty-five minutes and then another hour and fifteen kind of thing were [sic] we sat in there and had these discussions with him." [Testimony of Lt. Gen. Randall M Schmidt, Taken 24 August 2005 at Davis Mountain Air Force Base, Arizona, Dept. of the Army Inspector General, Investigations Division, pp. a-30 to a-53, Jaffer and Singh, op. cit].

So what should Congress know as it decides what is to be done?

We torture, illegally, by directive; the directives come from the top; those who torture know it is probably criminal; when we torture prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, they will tell us anything they think we want to hear -- including implicate themselves falsely, as many reports from Human Rights Watch and other rights organizations testify to -- to make the torture stop; and the White House routinely uses that faked or coerced unverifiable "intelligence" to buttress its wholesale assault on our liberties.

As the CIA tries to spin its apparent crimes and claim that its waterboarding and other forms of criminal torture "saved lives" -- while conveniently offering no evidence to back that up, and while the administration withholds evidence to the contrary from the lawyers of the detainees -- we should bear in mind that the decades of research on torture summarized in the magisterial survey "The Question of Torture" show beyond the shadow of a doubt that prisoners being tortured will indeed "say anything." When American prisoners were tortured by the North Vietnamese, their confessions were phrased in Communist cliches.

We should note too -- as the White House tries to muddy the waters by pretending that there has ever been a "debate" about such acts as these -- that the US in the past prosecuted waterboarding itself: when the Japanese had waterboarded US prisoners they were convicted with sentences of fifteen years of hard labor.

We should also bear in mind that the Bush White House has deliberately crafted its memos and laws -- such as the Bybee/Gonzales "torture memo" and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- with a keen eye to seeking indemnification of its own guilt regarding having committed evident crimes, because those involved know quite well that acts committed could be criminal acts. (An historical note worth mentioning, when we consider how hyperalert the Bush White House has been to the issue of seeking retroactively to protect itself and its subordinates from prosecution for war and other crimes, is that the Nuremberg Trials eventually swept up influential Nazi industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen of IG Farben -- who relied on Auschwitz slave labor -- and with whom Prescott Bush had collaborated in amassing the Bush family millions; some of the sentences given to those industrialists found guilty in the postwar trials were severe.) For a moment postwar, the legal spotlight was also about to search out and hold accountable the several prominent US investors who had partnered with Nazi industrialists (see the exhaustively documented study of US/Nazi corporate collaboration, IBM and the Holocaust.)

Prosecution for war crimes and other criminal acts, which the administration so clearly recognizes that it may well have committed -- which its legislation so clearly shows it realized it may well commit in advance of the commission -- is the only consequence the Bush team seems to be really afraid of as it attempts its multiple subversions of the rule of law. This is why the nation's grassroots call for a truly independent investigation into possible criminality is so very urgent and so necessary to restore the rule of law in our nation.

Mr. Mukasey could look up his own department's files and understand that waterboarding is a war crime; not only that, the US Military prosecuted waterboarding as a war crime itself in 1902 -- it had been used against prisoners in the Phillipines -- and those Americans who had committed it received convictions from the military. It is hopeless to rely on the Justice Department.

An independent special prosecutor must be appointed. The people who are found guilty, in America, must face justice.

Let the investigations begin.

Comments

[skyreader7]

Who is responsible for this and the hundreds of other crimes this administration has committed? The man who said, "I am the Decider."

[kingcityguru]

If torturing these prisoners resulted in the prevention of only one terrorist attack (and you have to think that it did as the US has not been attacked since 9/11) then it is all good.
Water Board away and keep America safe until the scurge of radical Islam has been vanquished 100 years from now.

[madprophet]

No investigation will get off the ground. The Congress does not have the integrity and guts to actually do the right thing.

If they can't/won't impeach Cheney et al, they won't investigate either.

[Alexjonesfan]

Naomi was on the Alex Jones show last week. The interview was great. You can hear her validate most of Mr. Jones points. She is an eloquent speaker. I posted the interview and link to more information here:
http://www.alexjonesfan58.com

[mikeeforthetruth]

In this Administration- the R"s (and I don"t mean Republicans) are trying to destroy our (human) way of life

I seem to be living in a nation that simply does not know what freedom is.
John Whiteside Parsons

MWiz of - truthseekerforum.com

[dryfactoidobotanoid]

there's some kind of inadequacy in the rhetoric of protest. it is legalistic and morally idealistic, but it lacks the depth and urgency of Covenant, Prophecy, Betrayal, and Redemption (the Greil Marcus formula for the American Voice).

just a thought ...

[speakingtruth2power]

My only question about why these particular tapes were destroyed is, WHAT WAS REVEALED during the torture sessions that BushCo wanted buried and had unlawfully withheld from the 9-11 Commission?

Certainly torture is one of their war crimes they should be held accountable for BUT what other high crimes and treason were revealed? Were there Saudi-Pakistani-Bush crime family connections to 9-11 that they don't want exposed?

While I don't believe that BushCo conspired to take down the towers to begin a takeover of our democracy, their family history makes clear that nothing should be put past the evils of the Bush Family.

[ActuallyRemembers]

Please debate all the particulars. But remember, what it all boils down to is a plethora of well supported accusations on numerous counts that suggest this administration is acting and has acted criminally outside of the law.
If in the future we eschew adequate investigation, prosecution, and if warranted, sentencing, this administration will long continue to be a festering infection threatening our republic and the integrity of our culture.
The president (and the ex-president he will become) must be held as accountable as any citizen.

[FogBelter]

Naomi, the Bush Administration has resurrected in practice the famous quote of Benjamin Franklin:

"We must, indeed, all hang together, or most assuredly we shall all hang separately"

Appointing Mukasey AG was a stroke of Genius ... him being the Judge in charge of the Padilla case. He knows, personally, there was torture employed, and therefore he is a coconspirator in War Crimes.

Mukasey HAS to kill this investigation of the CIA Tape destruction ... it's his ass on the line too.

[JayWilliams]

The rule of law is: Thou shalt not do unto a Republican without his knowledge and consent.
Moral clarity is: Act in accordance with Republican requests.

[Vajara]

We must continue to remind those in power and who have responsibility to defend our Constitution that Freedom=Responsibility. They can never forget that their primary responsibility is to secure our trust and support our Laws. Our democracy requires that our leaders never waiver, no matter what the situation, our Constitution and our Bill of Rights are their guidelines for making decisions and for preserving our Freedom.

Unfortunately, this administration and the Justice Department have lost their (our) way, continue to cover up their mistakes, withdraw further from the Truth and build a wall around themselves.

Don't you think it is time for Congress to "Tear Down This Wall?"

[factanonverba]

I bought Naomi Wolf's book, Letter to a Young Patriot, this past summer when it first came out. I've decided to buy one more and gift it to a friend on the condition that once read it should be passed on. Currently I am reading Political Sermons of the American Founding Era, 1730-1805, a collection of sermons and essays by clerics. It is amazing how many of these voice concerns that Ms. Wolf raises. I think it clear that this is the start of a new era of dissenters in defense of the Constitution. The erosion of liberties under this Administration has been serious and to be honest a quick and easy restoration is unlikely. Ms. Wolf's pamphlet is a siren call and the more people that read it the better. In the end, the only defense we will have is our conscience and our only weapon a deeply-held belief on what constitutes liberty.

[PuffDragon]

Honesty is a greater threat to this administration than terrorism.

Law in America isn't happening right now. Bush's signing statements, torture policies and other lawlessness have unspoken support from Congress and the Senate. Refusal by those in positions of power (Pelosi, Reid, Rahm Emanuel and others) to protect the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and enforce the rule of law on this president and vice-president.

As long as "Impeachment is off the table", this isn't the America we thought it was.

[Big René]

Fact is: that they attacked New York on 11 september 2001, because they kidnapped a child, this is the son of a new Crownprince in the Netherlands who has to rise.
What could the reason be for that kidnapping? or was it a combination of al those reasons?
The kidnapping was an attemp to murder up to 19 million people. As they say: "nowing, or not nowing".

[tz1]

Why bother? During the Clinton administration many very serious abuses occurred, but although they were just as much a violation of the rule of law and often involved death (consider the Branch Davidians) nothing was done.

And we laughed about the constitution, the rule of law, and about applying it when the abuses were to protect his Casanova episodes.

But now you want the respect for the rule of law, due process, balance of power back? Oh yes, it is more serious now, but when it came time to showing respect for the party, or the man, or whatever v.s. the law, the law was rejected. We decided we were not a nation of laws but of men.

Impeach Bush? But he wasn't committing perjury about his mistress, he was trying to save us from terrorists. Law? The law is DEAD. It was disrespected and raped by not holding Clinton accountable (there were many more serious things like the FBI files).

Most of the 10 steps toward tyranny had their prototypes and test-firings in the 8 years of Clinton and few objected and those who did were derided.

So seeing that Clinton could get away with it for petty personal reasons, Bush's mission from God had nothing to worry about.

Haliburton and Lockheed did work for Clinton, I expect Blackwater to be Hillary or Obama's mercenaries, and every one of the 10 steps will accelerate - but with the approval of most here because it won't be "we" on "the list", but "them".

It is not that people disagree with tyranny, only who is tyrant.

And torture will continue. I see the same language constructs - but from the other side - used on abortion.
Enhanced interrogation techniques - reproductive rights. Can't show it on TV. It is needed to save lives (coathangers). It should be safe, legal, and rare. It is too divisive to talk about.

So small human beings will be shredded, and large ones will be repeatedly drowned, with a wink and a nod, lest we be inconvenienced.