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Julie Menin: Lower Manhattan is the Proper Place to Try Khalid Sheikh Mohmammed

2009-11-15T22:51:46Z

My phone started ringing within minutes of Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in Lower Manhattan, just blocks away from Ground Zero. I have represented the Lower Manhattan district for over four years as Chairperson of Community Board 1 and sit on several of the government boards that govern downtown Manhattan. People in the community called me upon hearing the news, some saying it is fitting that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed be brought to justice in the community that he attacked, while others feared security risks of the impending trial. The announcement led to a torrential outpouring of emotion and viewpoints, which Republican officials were quick to pounce on and politicize.

Personally, and I stress I speak for myself here, I think it is imperative and absolutely appropriate that Mr. Mohammed be tried in the shadow of the World Trade Center site. In my view, it should indeed be a jury of New Yorkers, the community who was most adversely impacted by the horrific events of September 11th, who decide Mr. Mohammed's fate. The people outside of the court room are entitled to have the trial in their community, the place of the attack, just as Mr. Mohammed is entitled to a fair trial in the court room. Federal trials are open to the public and this will then be an opportunity for family members, the community and the public as a whole to try to get closure on a horrifying event. Some defense attorneys have suggested that Lower Manhattan will not afford him a fair trial, as the jury pool is tainted. But what community was not impacted by 9-11? What constitutes fairness will be a well run jury selection process and voire dire.

Another reason the trial should absolutely be held in federal court in Lower Manhattan is for the rule of law to be upheld. Holder's announcement brought an end to a dishonorable chapter in our nation's history when the Bush Administration in 2006 set up special military tribunals with their own standards of evidentiary rules that were significantly looser than those required in a criminal trial in federal court. Most disturbingly, no sooner did Holder make his announcement, then we quickly saw Republican officials jump to condemn the decision and to urge a return to the secret military tribunals.

"Classified information can be inadvertently leaked" intoned Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell and then further ominously warned: "And our communities will be potential targets for attack." McConnell and others capitalized on the politics of fear to scare Americans into believing that we must accept these secret military tribunals as the only venue. Dick Cheney and Joe Lieberman quickly took to the Fox news airwaves to deride Holder's decision. Don't McConnell, Cheney and Lieberman remember that it was a New York federal court who convicted Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman, who was the mastermind behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing? Since the September 11th attacks, in fact, 195 terrorists have been tried and convicted in the federal justice system. Not one of these convicted individuals has ever escaped from the supermax federal prisons. Under Bush's much vaunted military tribunal system, only 3 cases have commenced with none of them resulting in a conviction.

Most disconcerting, however, is the absolute disregard for the rule of law that these special tribunals had. We would have had justice served years ago for the families of the 9/11 victims, for the community that was attacked, and for our nation as a whole, if the Bush Administration had handled Mr. Mohammed and other detainees in the proper way from the beginning. After years of delaying a proper trial, we now finally have the opportunity to bring closure to the horrific events of September 11th.

A final reason that it is imperative that the venue be in federal court is so we can have a full public airing of the methods of interrogation that were utilized. Mr. Mohammed was the subject of 183 instances of waterboarding, or simulated drowning. Why should that information about waterboarding and other methods of enhanced interrogation be locked away in a secret tribunal rather than see the light of the day that a public trial in federal court will afford. We once and for all need to shed light on the fact that a means of torture was used, and used repeatedly. We have to remember that the United States after World War II, in the Tokyo Trials, tried and convicted, and indeed hung, Japanese soldiers who had waterboarded American POW's. It is also instructive to look at our Founding Fathers such as Thomas Jefferson who decried the use of torture in his Notes on the State of Virginia "What has been the effect of coercion?" he asked. "To make one half the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth." In words that ring all the more truly today, Jefferson wrote to Thomas Paine: "I consider [trial by jury] as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution."

New York City deserves this trial. Our community has lived with the impact of the September 11th attacks. We expect a fair trial, and one that actually happens unlike the secret military tribunals, and one which is open and public and upholds the rule of law, except of course for issues affecting national security where the federal government has proper procedures in place to handle classified information. We finally have the opportunity to have a full airing on the devastating September 11th attacks and I hope to be there in the trial room in my community to hear it too.

The 'Bright Line Rule': New Papers Detail FBI, CIA Wrangle Over Torture

2009-10-31T11:24:27Z

WASHINGTON — Newly released documents show the FBI interviewed a naked, chained terror suspect back in 2002 as the bureau struggled with the CIA over how to treat high-value prisoners.

Details of the interrogation were contained in documents released late Friday as part of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International, and Judicial Watch.

Naomi Wolf: "Friending" Binyam Mohamed

2009-10-29T16:52:38Z

For four years now, I have been following the fates of the hundreds of men who have been -- and the 200 plus men who still are -- being held at Guantánamo Bay, and, the record is now clear, most of whom have been tortured. But until this week I had never actually heard such a single man's actual voice.

When I went to the prison in June of this year, we journalists were brought to view the prisoners from afar -- exactly as if they were dangerous animals in a cage. They called to us, anguishedly, in a voice that still haunts me. "Can I talk to them?" I asked. Many of them speak English. No; no, no, was the answer. No one is permitted to talk to them. Prisoners in the US have many rights to speak, even from prison; but silencing the Guantánamo detainees has been a key to maintaining a working injustice, as well as a key to manipulating US popular opinion. Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney's daughter Liz Cheney have started a new organization to spin the torture at Guantánamo and elsewhere: 'Keep America Safe.' (Or: 'Keep Daddy Out of Prison.') But if the perpetrators are to continue to spin America, the prisoners' voices have to continue to be silenced.

Even those who empathize with the detainees tend to speak 'for' them -- casting them as faceless, voiceless victims, just as the opposite 'side' casts them as faceless, voiceless monsters.

Recently I have been in touch with Binyam Mohamed, who is the UK resident who was released from Guantánamo in February -- after seven years' captivity without charges -- and who last Friday won a major victory when a British court ruled that the US and the UK could not continue to conceal from the public seven paragraphs in documents that describe the horrific torture of Mr Mohamed in 'black sites' and at Guantánamo. He is also suing Boeing for its part in rendering him to 'black sites.'

The UK government is appealing the ruling, so we still can't know what happened to him; but officials have told reporters that one action that the paragraphs describe is the cutting of genitals with a razor; waterboarding, this official said dryly, is well down on the list of atrocities Mr. Mohamed suffered.

President Obama has sought to keep these seven paragraphs under seal. Hillary Clinton has also. Joe Lieberman drafted an amendment to a bill to conceal photographs relating to this abuse.

Why are our leaders still trying so desperately to cover up what Mr. Mohamed's record will show?

I have written here on the Huffington Post before now about the sexual nature of many forms of now fully documented cases of US abuse and torture at Guantánamo and Baghram (as well as the better-known cases at Abu Ghraib.) Physicians for Human Rights have fully confirmed that prisoners were often violated anally with objects. To these forms of sexual torture, Binyam Mohamed's seven paragraphs and the photographic evidence Lieberman wishes a law to suppress would add, it appears, the cutting of a man's genitals with a razor.

As Mr Mohamed told the UK Daily Mail, "they cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel. I was totally naked.... One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make cuts. He did it once, and they stood still for maybe a minute, watching my reaction.

"I was in agony, crying, trying desperately to suppress myself, but I was screaming.... They must have done this 20 to 30 times in maybe two hours.... They cut all over my private parts."

This form of torture, Mr. Mohamed told David Cole of the Daily Mail, was repeated many times over the next 15 months.

Mr Mohamed said further that when he was later taken into direct US custody, a female official was sent in daily to photograph his intimate wounds, saying that the photos were "for Washington." These photos are almost certainly among the images that President Obama, Lieberman and Mrs Clinton are seeking to suppress. Such an image -- as you and every man in America, if not around the world, would agree -- would not be survivable, politically.

His lawyer, Clive Stafford Smith of the UK rights organization Reprieve, was threatened with six months in prison by the US -- Obama's team -- for writing a letter to President Obama describing what had happened to his client.

In a masterpiece of perversity, the US classified the torture used against the prisoners -- so that in America, if US lawyers tell their clients' own stories -- IF THEY TELL THEIR OWN STORIES they are illegally releasing 'classified information.' It is like someone saying to a woman: I raped you, and now I will classify how I raped you, so if you tell anyone you were raped -- I can send you to prison.

(Right now, thinking about how the truth got out in Soviet societies before 1989, I am asking lawyers at rights organizations if I can legally tell these stories through allegory, as in Animal Farm. "Once there was an island...")

The Obama administration shocked those of us working on human rights issues by threatening the UK's intelligence service with refusing to cooperate in intelligence-sharing about terrorist threats if the UK did not continue to conceal these seven paragraphs. President Obama was willing to put the thirty million innocent UK citizens at grave risk in order to keep secret what happened to Mr Mohamed. Hillary Clinton, to her shame, sought to do so again as the trial
unfolded. I believe Mrs Clinton's female supporters in particular should think about the fact that America's self-styled premiere role model for feminism has lent her voice and influence to the cover-up of torture that took this form of a sexual assault.

I reached out to to Mr. Mohamed because he had known Mohamed al-Hanashi, the thirty-one-year-old Yemenite detainee, the prisoners' representative -- the man who knew all the crimes committed against his fellows -- who was declared an "apparent suicide" in Guantánamo in June. (He had been called into a meeting with the admiral and the head of the Guard Force three days before the inauguration -- never returned to his cell -- and was taken straight from that meeting to the psych ward, where it is impossible to kill yourself, until his death). Mr. Mohamed had said Mr. al Hanashi was an upbeat person with no mental problems and would never have considered suicide.

Lt. Commander Brook DeWalt, spokesman for Guantánamo, has confirmed now after four months of my asking the status of the investigation into Mr al-Hanashi's death that it is now a Naval criminal investigation -- meaning that he is no longer considered a suicide but a victim of a murder or a negligent homicide. Obama's Gitmo is still refusing to release to me any more information -- despite this secretive internal investigation being a violation of Geneva Conventions' strictures on what you must do -- hold an independent transparent investigation -- when there is a death in custody.

In the course of seeking Mr. Mohamed out, I received his email -- and had that odd sense of unreality to see this little piece of normality; not monster, not 'victim' alone; a guy with an email address.

We corresponded; and I read an Op-ed piece he is writing, which makes the case that America's actions in torturing people, and denying them due process, did more to inflate al Qaida's numbers than any other factor; and that America can regain hearts and minds around the world by prosecuting rather than concealing war crimes. He also points out that the US lumped all kinds of groups that were critical of the US but not wishing to take up any violent action against us under the "logo" of Al Qaida -- and, he said, terrified the Muslim world by saying "you are either with us or against us" -- meaning, you could not be anywhere in the middle.

This idea bears a great deal more elucidation. I was also shocked when he referred to US military as 'our kidnappers' -- but that is of course the literal truth from his perspective. Uncomfortable as it made me, it was good to be shocked by his voice; Jefferson knew that the power of free speech is that it forces you to face another human being's version of truth. (Jefferson's beliefs have been having a tough time; even as we emailed, though, I was aware that that very action could have gotten me too into legal trouble during the Bush era.)

I spoke to Mr. Mohamed by phone, a brief, unremarkable conversation about
logistics; but in speaking directly, human to human, for the first time, I had an existential shock. It is one thing when these names are abstract; another when you hear a voice, just like the voices of anyone you know, but with layers and layers of unspeakable sorrow resonating underneath and you think: this is one man here on the other end of the line who was tortured in my name, in our names.

I asked if I could interview him about his own story and I felt the closing-down: he explained that he is unable to tell me what was done to him, since his case is ongoing, and, I presumed, because of the issues of classification. This silencing still seemed to me as painful - painful on both sides -- as other kinds of pain.

The right to speak is a powerful one. The US offered to release Mr. Mohamed from Guantánamo years ago -- in exchange for his silence about what happened to him -- and he refused the deal. He chose to stay in rather than leave under a charge of silence.

President Obama wants to try some remaining prisoners in real trials; to release some; and he wants a third category, the devil's own category -- of people who will be held forever because of `problems with evidence.' What are the problems with evidence? The problems are political: it will be problematic that what was done to these men will emerge into light and will be so horrific -- say, like the seven paragraphs about the cutting of a prisoner's genitals -- that a continued cover-up and legal impunity will be unsustainable.

The US's argument has been that if the paragraphs and photos of this particular torture emerge, it will inflame Muslim anger against us. It is no secret in the Muslim world, though, what happened to Mr. Mohamed and others situated like him. And as for here in the West? Well, that argument doesn't hold water any more: I just told a million people what is in the seven paragraphs, and in at least some of the photos.

Next excuse?

Mr Mohamed let me know he had 'friended' me on Facebook. I 'friended' him back. I may agree with him or not as we and other former detainees and I communicate directly, and as I seek to bring their voices through my websites and interviews to American ears. But, in agreement or not, there are voices I -- we -- need to hear. In a democracy, you supposed to be allowed to do that.

Ironically, European media has given a lot of space to the former prisoners' direct voices and stories; but we almost never hear them in our media bubble in the US. It is we Americans who are being kept, intellectually, in a soundproof, padded room. Only our hearing these voices can begin our long arduous path to our own sense of regained self-respect -- hearing, listening, facing, grieving, and owning the fact that this, this, is what we have done.

Mother Says School Aide 'Waterboarded' Her 14-Year-Old Autistic Son (VIDEO)

2009-10-22T19:05:08Z

The mother of a 14-year-old autistic boy has accused a school aide of 'waterboarding' her son by forcing his head under a running faucet. A fellow student has also claimed that the boy was also forced to eat his own vomit. Two teacher's aides have been charged with abusing the boy and other special needs children. Five families have filed charges and they believe that their children's disabilities prevented them from reporting the abuse.

The two school aides have resigned and are said to be giving the investigation their full cooperation.

WATCH:

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Jon Soltz: The Weakness of Liz Cheney

2009-10-19T10:40:51Z

Last year, as the presidential campaign was heating up, the far right introduced a new group to counter the progressive voice of the veterans at VoteVets.org. Freedom's Watch started and ended with a sputter, mainly because the group was led by political folks who never served a day in their life -- from original leader Ari Fleischer through Brad Blakeman, who saw the group through to its quick end.

History seems to be repeating itself, with Liz Cheney, rolling out a new neo-con organization, Keep America Safe. The group's mission seems to be two-fold. First, try to rewrite history so that Dick Cheney looks like a visionary. And second, convince Americans that they're all going to die because of Barack Obama.

The problem, however, with this is also two-fold. First, Liz Cheney has no experience fighting wars and gets details wrong when she tries to look like she knows what she's talking about. Second, no matter how tough she talks, Liz Cheney's positions are weak, just like her father's.

From trying to falsely argue that our troops on the battlefield read Miranda rights to those enemy combatants we detain, to claiming that we employ waterboarding on our own soldiers in the same way we did with detainees (around 4:15 in the link), Liz Cheney shows she simply has no idea what she's talking about. It's not surprising, since she's simply carrying on the same failed philosophy put forth by a guy who never had the courage to put on the uniform himself -- indeed, actually evaded the call of his nation to do so.

More importantly, though, is that despite her tough bluster, Liz Cheney is an incredibly weak person. Weak people see everything in black and white, and take the easiest path. It's pretty easy to ignore the reputation issues Guantanamo Bay presents to our troops in harm's way who are trying to win hearts and minds, or that the facility is used as a recruiting poster for al Qaeda. It's easy to ignore what VoteVets.org's Jay Bagwell says in this video -- that detainees in Afghanistan had pamphlets on them depicting what happened at Gitmo. It's easy to ignore the Geneva Conventions and human rights laws, and what they say about torture. It's easy to ignore the fact that torture doesn't get actionable intelligence. It's easy to forget that what makes us the greatest nation in the world is partly based on our system of Justice, which involves trials. It's easy to fail to recognize that for the Muslims in the Middle East and Afghanistan region, snatching people up and putting them away forever without a trial is what hardline dictators and regimes do -- and that is the real problem that Guantanamo presents.

It takes a strong person to take all those things into consideration, and keep America on the moral high ground while protecting this nation. Only a morally and intellectually weak person can toss all those considerations away so willy-nilly. And that's what you have in Liz Cheney.

The ironic part of it is that, especially on Gitmo, those opposed to Liz Cheney have the tougher stance on terrorists. One of the favorite points that neo-cons like to make is that the facility at Gitmo allows detainees to socialize with each other, that they have top notch medical facilities there, and that besides the whole torture thing, they have life pretty good.

Excuse me? People that may have plotted to do America harm have it pretty good? That's not acceptable. By moving the detainees to our Super Max prison and putting them on trial, we can finally convict those who are guilty. Then, we can move those not sentenced to death to solitary at the Supermax, where they'll live out the rest of their days completely alone in a living hell -- the fate that they deserve -- shut away from the general population, so they cannot influence other prisoners with their bile. That's not only a tougher position than Cheney, it also upholds our values.

It also has been done already with terrorists and done successfully. The Supermax has been the home of Ramzi Yousef, who headed the group that carried out the first bombing of the World Trade Center; Zacarias Moussaoui, 9/11 conspirator; Ahmed Ressam, of the Los Angeles airport millennium attack plots; Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, who conspired to kill President George W. Bush; Wadih el-Hage, guilty of the 1998 bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Kenya; Jose Padilla, who plotted detonating a dirty bomb; Terry Nichols and Timothy McVeigh of the Oklahoma City bombing; and the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski.

In the end, Liz Cheney and Keep America Safe are just a re-run of what was already tried and failed in 2008. Namely, using the veil of fear to mask an un-informed, false, and weak position. Maybe it'll win her points within the extreme right, but the American people have smartened up to her game, and they've decided they're stronger than she is.

Crossposted at VetVoice.com

Whitehouse Calls For Wider Criminal Probe Of Torture

2009-09-01T09:30:59Z

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.), the former U.S. Attorney who's been pointing out for more than a year that waterboarding is and always has been torture, made the key point yesterday (and the same one I made here) that the criminal investigation of "enhanced interrogation techniques" that turned into torture would be an ordinary and obvious criminal investigation were it not for the fact that the subjects of inquiry include senior government officials.

Ridge: Waterboarding Was "Wrong"; America Shouldn't Have Done It

2009-08-31T12:27:08Z

Looks like Tom Ridge has joined the ranks of terrorist-sympathizers.

In a throwaway comment in this interview with ABC News earlier today, the former homeland security chief said he thought the decision to waterboard was "wrong." While Ridge also strongly took issue with Attorney General Eric Holder's decision to probe rogue CIA interrogators, Ridge's declaration about waterboarding is significant, and here's why:

After Waterboarding, Sept. 11 Planner Recast As An Asset for CIA, Leading "Terrorist Tutorials"

2009-08-29T09:44:08Z

After enduring the CIA's harshest interrogation methods and spending more than a year in the agency's secret prisons, Khalid Sheik Mohammed stood before U.S. intelligence officers in a makeshift lecture hall, leading what they called "terrorist tutorials."

Stephen Rickard: Fix the Field Manual

2009-08-27T16:36:32Z

Every time we think we know how bad it was we learn it was worse. The newly released CIA interrogation instructions paint a graphic picture of what "enhanced" techniques looked like in practice -- naked, shivering prisoners wearing soiled diapers being slapped and slammed repeatedly into walls. And that's just the instructions. No wonder the CIA destroyed the interrogation videotapes.

The instructions demonstrate powerfully why President Obama and the Interrogation Task Force deserve high praise for making a decisive break with these sordid Bush Administration practices and concluding that there is no legitimate need for interrogation techniques that go outside of the US Army Field Manual on Interrogation.

The Field Manual bans a number of forms of torture, like waterboarding. But more importantly it permits only a set of specifically described, tried and true, non-abusive techniques. It contains these essential protections against torture:

It's a single standard for the whole US Government.

It effectively bans all techniques not specifically described and authorized.

It's public.

The Field Manual contains one other critical protection -- the "Golden Rule." It tells interrogators to ask themselves, "Would I want this technique used on a captured American?" If not, don't use it. We owe a debt of gratitude to the mostly unheralded people who fought hard inside the Bush Administration and the military to preserve this and other core elements of the Field Manual.

But like so much else the Field Manual did not escape the Bush Administration unscathed. When the Administration revised the Manual in 2006 it deleted key policy statements. These included the observation, now endorsed by the Interrogation Task Force, that "[e]xperience shows that the use of prohibited techniques is not necessary to gain the cooperation of interrogation sources." The Bush Administration also deleted the important if obvious statement that torturing others may "place U.S. and allied personnel in enemy hands at a greater risk of abuse by their captors." These points should be restored.

More importantly, the Bush revisions created at least three critical problems which the Obama Administration must fix:

The Manual now approves sleep deprivation. Appendix M of the Manual ("Restricted Interrogation Technique - Separation") unfortunately steps on the treacherous terrain of creating special rules for special prisoners, including sleep deprivation -- a clearly illegal technique. Appendix M needs to be immediately deleted.

The Bush Administration deleted clear prohibitions against sleep deprivation and stress positions which the old Manual explicitly called "torture." That language should be restored.

The revised 2006 Manual appears to have been carefully edited to avoid unequivocal condemnation of most of the "enhanced" interrogation techniques. They should be expressly prohibited.

Few people have focused on this last point. As is well known, the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Bush Justice Department wrote several "torture memos" defending the legality of about a dozen abusive interrogation techniques. These included the "attention grasp," slamming prisoners into plywood walls, the "insult" and "belly" slaps, "cramped confinement," wall standing and other stress positions, water dousing and cold, sleep deprivation, nudity and waterboarding. All of the "enhanced" techniques are implicitly banned by the Field Manual because none of them are approved for use (with the important exception of sleep deprivation in Appendix M). But what is very striking about the revised 2006 Field Manual is that almost none of them are explicitly banned.

It strains credulity to think this was an accident. Language in the old Manual clearly banned wall standing and other stress positions. It was deleted. The old Manual called sleep deprivation "torture." That was deleted. Rather than banning the use of cold, the 2006 Manual only prohibits causing "hypothermia" consistent with OLC limits on using cold. The 2006 Manual prohibits "beatings ... or other forms of physical pain." But it doesn't flatly ban assaults, which is critical because the OLC memos argue at great length that the authorized physical assaults - slapping, grabbing, walling and others - were intended to cause shock and not "pain." The 2006 Manual does not ban using water or cramped confinement.

In fact, waterboarding and nudity are probably the only "enhanced" Bush Administration techniques that John Yoo, principle author of the Bush "torture memos," would concede are expressly banned by the 2006 Manual. But these are the proverbial exceptions that prove the rule. By 2006 both had already been abandoned by the Administration.

President Obama has taken a vital step. But he needs to immediately shore up the foundation of his new interrogation policy by fixing the Field Manual.

John H. Tucker: C.I.A. Inspector General Report: Did Military Doctors Intervene When Necessary?

2009-08-25T18:31:51Z

Medical and legal experts are now questioning whether military doctors violated professional ethics while monitoring harsh interrogation techniques described in the C.I.A. inspector general's report released yesterday by the Obama administration.

The report, written in 2004 by Inspector General John L. Helgerson, outlines brutal interrogation techniques, such as choking, shackling and waterboarding, used against terror suspects in secret overseas prisons. It includes an appendix on medical and psychological support, noting that medics were responsible for monitoring the health of the detainees subjected to enhanced interrogation techniques.

The Hippocratic Oath states that doctors should consider first the health of the patient and never do physical harm.

Given that at least a dozen prisoners -- and likely more -- have died by homicide in military prisons this decade, many have wondered how often doctors monitored torturous interrogations without intervening, as was mandated by designers of the interrogation program.

"What we've learned is that high-value prisoners were subjected to a program designed to break them down psychologically and that medical professionals assessed and monitored them while they were being abused," said Steven H. Miles, whose book, Oath Betrayed: America's Torture Doctors, describes widespread medical abuses and cover-ups in U.S. military prisons.

A report written by the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2006 revealed that doctors in some instances physically participated in interrogations at C.I.A. black sites. That report, obtained and released by journalist Mark Danner earlier this year, describes an episode during which a doctor used a pulse oxymeter (a medical device that is placed on a patient's finger) to monitor the blood-oxygen level of a detainee being waterboarded for an hour.

"This is a technology that was developed for therapeutic purposes, and instead it's being employed basically to monitor torture to make sure we don't kill the person," said Greg Bloche, a doctor and law professor at Georgetown University. "That's a pretty egregious misuse of medical technology."

During a waterboard session, a prisoner is strapped to a bench while water is poured onto a cloth draped over his face, in order to simulate drowning, giving a prisoner a sense of imminent death.

According to the Red Cross report, doctors measured the swelling around the shackled ankles of detainees in order to detect signs of low-blood circulation. "The doctors weren't minimizing pain, they were helping calibrate pain," said Scott Allen, a Rhode Island doctor and adviser to the advocacy group Physicians for Human Rights.

The interrogation methods have been widely condemned as torture and abandoned by the Obama administration. The American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association have also denounced them. United States Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has recruited John H. Durham, a veteran federal prosecutor, to investigate the abuse of prisoners.

Doctors stationed at the secret prisons intervened when interrogation methods grew too rough on more than one occasion, according to the Red Cross report. But many familiar with the report suggest that doctors failed to intervene on other occasions.

"You have examples where someone's getting their arm dislocated, and an unidentified medical professional pops the arm back in and says, 'continue,' " said Nathaniel Raymond, a spokesman for Physicians for Human Rights.

Some argue that military doctors are complicit in torture and should face trials or sanctions. As precedent, they point to the Nuremberg hearings following World War II. After top Nazi military commanders were tried, the next in line to face charges were doctors stationed at the death camps.

Health officials affiliated with the military from 2002 to 2004 -- when the harshest interrogations were taking place -- have disappeared from the debate. "This is not something that's daily supper-table conversation among me or my peers," said Michael Cowen, the surgeon general of the Navy during that time period.

William Winkenwerder, the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs during the Bush administration, who served as the principal medical adviser to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, said in an e-mail, "Matters relating to the subject of interrogations are the subject of ongoing litigation. It would not be appropriate for me to comment outside the context of litigation."

Some former military doctors defended the interrogation methods, claiming that physicians stationed at military prisons are, in effect, combatants, and the Hippocratic Oath needn't apply.

"War is not a sanitary operation," said Stephen Cunnion, a retired captain in the U.S. Navy Medical Corps and now a senior fellow at the Potomac Institute for Policy Studies. He said the interrogation methods kept Americans safe. "Once the enemy finds your weaknesses, they use them. They'll just laugh this off and won't tell us anything."

Kelly Faucette, a retired colonel and Army doctor, who saved the life of a terrorist while he was in Iraq, disagreed, saying the methods violate a doctor's mission.

"They're completely against any ethical principles that go with medicine," he said. "We have a right to help people and to treat their illnesses ... (not to) evaluate whether a person was medically able to tolerate being abused or tortured."

The numbers of interrogated detainees and participating doctors are not known. Miles said the number of detainees exposed to harsh interrogations reached the hundreds, and likely the thousands.

In the C.I.A. report, designers of the program stated that the interrogation methods do not cause severe mental pain or suffering. Critics, however, point to the Red Cross report, which describes a claim by prisoner Abu Zabaydah that he lost control of his urine while being waterboarded in 2002 and continued to lose control of his urine during stressful situations. Zabaydah was waterboarded at least 83 times in August that year.

It's possible that medical complicity went beyond torture. Many experts, including Miles and Bloche, said that some military doctors altered death certificates of detainees to cover up homicides. Others claim that doctors violated confidentiality codes by handing over to interrogators the medical records of detainees, which were then used to create individually tailored interrogation regimes.

Joseph A. Palermo: "We're Going to Kill Your Children": The CIA Inspector General's Report

2009-08-25T13:42:33Z

First let me state the obvious: the May 7, 2004 "Special Review" on interrogations from the Central Intelligence Agency's Inspector General is a heavily redacted document. Pages and pages of the report, titled "Counterterrorism Detention and Interrogation Activities (September 2001-October 2003)," are either completely blackened out or mostly so. As a historian with a lot of experience with these kinds of documents, I can tell you that whenever the narrative gets juicy, that's when all the black ink spills over everything (you should see Robert F. Kennedy's FBI file!). Whenever I read these types of censored government records, like those I recently encountered at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, I always get the feeling that I live in the old Soviet Union instead of in a representative "democracy." Having said that, there is much in this wretched government text that should make any human being with a soul (Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck need not apply) to feel quite uneasy, even sick at heart. It's another piece of evidence chronicling one of the most despicable episodes in American history, brought to you by the George W. Bush/Dick Cheney administration.

Given the fact that the power drill later became the low-cost torture device of choice among those fighting in Iraq when the sectarian bloodbath was in full swing it's stunning that Americans working for the CIA used power drills back in 2001 for "interrogations." "[T]he debriefer used a power drill to frighten Al-Nashiri. With [redacted] consent, the debriefer entered the detainee's cell and revved the drill while the detainee stood naked and hooded." (p. 42)

And given that attacks aimed at the family members of "high-value" Iraqis who were involved in the insurgency became commonplace in the mid-2000s, the CIA interrogators' threats against the family members of prisoners held in U.S. custody also stands out: "During another incident [redacted] the same Headquarters debriefer, according to a [redacted] who was present, threatened Al-Nashiri by saying that if he did not talk, 'We could get your mother in here,' and 'We can bring your family in here.' . . . interrogation technique involve[d] sexually abusing female relatives in front of the detainee." (p. 42). And, according to the report, CIA interrogators told Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, the guy they waterboarded 183 times, that "if anything else happens in the United States, 'We're going to kill your children.'" (p. 43). This "we're going to kill your children" line I found particularly interesting since whenever I've found myself in debates with torture apologists I've always asked them how far they would go and used the harming of children and family members as a kind of Socratic question. They almost always drew a line there -- not the CIA.

Add to this macabre mix the use of mock executions and it becomes painfully clear that the U.S. had totally lost its bearings in the aftermath of 9-11 under the "steady-hand" leadership of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

Finally, Attorney General John Ashcroft has some explaining to do to Congress. Ashcroft testified to Congress that waterboarding was performed only a few times. The report states: "The Attorney General was informed the waterboard had been used 119 times on a single individual." (p. 45)

Yes, the CIA tortured thousands of people in Vietnam under the Phoenix Program; yes, the CIA trained torturers who went off to practice their dismal craft all over the world; yes, the CIA has engineered coups that brought torturing regimes to power and provided "liaison services" to security forces such as SAVAK in Iran, DINA in Chile, and ORDEN in El Salvador that were known to be notorious torture outfits; and yes, the CIA continues even under the Obama administration to use "rendition" of prisoners to U.S. client regimes that are well known to torture people. But this report shows that when Cheney and other Bush administration officials talked about "working the dark side" -- Wow! -- they really meant it. Someone has got to go to jail for this.

Attorney General Eric Holder's appointment of John Durham to investigate this sordid episode should be only the first step in a wholesale reevaluation of American national security priorities in the post-9-11 world.

Torture Memos Used "Overstated" "Exaggerated" Information From CIA

2009-08-24T18:02:29Z

Arguments used by Bush administration lawyers in their memos authorizing waterboarding and other forms of torture were based on "appreciably overstated" and "exaggerated" data provided by the CIA, according to a 2004 CIA Inspector General's report released on Monday.

In late 2001, the CIA's Office of Technical Services (OTS) authored a study of how information was obtained from interrogations and what kind of "long-term psychological effects" measures like waterboarding had on detainees. The OTS based its findings on the Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape training given to Navy Seals to bolster their immunity to torture.

But the OTS report -- which was later used by Bush Justice Department lawyers to provide the legal framework for the interrogation of suspected terrorists -- was incomplete at best and misleading at worst.

The CIA's own medical personnel was "neither consulted nor involved in the initial analysis of the risk and benefits" of the techniques described in the study, according to the 2004 CIA Inspector General report. Nor were medical personnel shown the OTS report before it was given to the Bush administration's Office of Legal Counsel -- where lawyers Jay Bybee and John Yoo put together the infamous "torture memos."

"In retrospect, based on the OLC extracts of the OTS report, OMS [the CIA's Office of Medical Services] contends that the reported sophistication of the preliminary EIT review was probably exaggerated, at least as it related to the waterboard, and that the power of this EIT was appreciably overstated in the report," reads a footnote on page 21 of the Inspector General report.

"Furthermore, OMS contends that the expertise of the SERE psychologist/interrogators on the waterboard was probably misrepresented at the time, as the SERE waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant. Consequently, according to OMS, there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe."

The IG report makes it clear that even by the Justice Department's standards, waterboarding was misused on several occasions.

According to the report, at one point a review was conducted on the use of waterboard on Khalid Shaykh Muhammad. It was concluded that it had been administered "in a manner inconsistent with the SERE application... and the description of the waterboard in the DoJ OLC opinion, in that the technique was used on Khalid Shaykh Muhammad a large number of times."

A review of videotapes of the interrogations of terrorist suspects, meanwhile, showed similar misuse. "The difference was in the manner in which the detainee's breathing was obstructed," the report reads. "At the SERE School and in the DoJ opinion, the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency interrogator continuously applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose. One of the psychologists/interrogators acknowledged that the Agency's use of the technique differed from that used in SERE training and explained that the Agency's technique is different because it is 'for real' and is more poignant and convincing."

Nadler: Obama Violating Law By Not Investigating Bush

2009-08-21T11:39:14Z

Even as the issue of torture appears likely to burst back onto the public agenda next week -- thanks to the much anticipated release of an internal CIA report -- one of the most progressive voices in Congress is arguing that the Obama White House has a legal obligation to investigate the Bush torture legacy.

New York Congressman Jerry Nadler, a senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, told the Huffington Post that he believed that President Obama would be breaking the law if he decided to oppose launching investigation into the authorization of torture.

"If they follow the law they have no choice," Nadler said in an interview this past weekend.

The logic, for Nadler, is straightforward. As a signatory of the convention against torture, and as a result of the anti-torture act of 1996, the United States government is obligated to investigate accusations of torture when they occur in its jurisdiction.

The alternative, Nadler said, "would be violating the law. They would be not upholding the law; they would be violating it."

Nadler said that a special prosecutor should handle the task, because some of the likely subjects of such an investigation worked in the Justice Department. "There is an inherent conflict interest," said Nadler," which is why you must appoint a special prosecutor. But, again, you have no choice because that's the law."

Respected by his colleagues as one of the sharpest legal minds in Congress, Nadler has taken a leading role in pushing the Obama administration to investigate its predecessor. Beyond the legal requirements, he argues that there is a moral and political imperative - lest the precedent be set that potential illegalities go un-probed. In recent weeks, Attorney General Eric Holder has hinted that he would support a special prosecutor to look into the narrow issue of whether some interrogators exceeded their instructions. But Nadler is far from satisfied with what he's seeing from DOJ.

"[Holder] was strongly inclined to support a special prosecutor," he said. "But not for the lawyers who wrote the memos justifying the torture, and not for anybody who acted within the scope of those memos; only for some local level guy who acted beyond the scope of those memos, who waterboarded with too much water or whatever."

"You must not limit it that way," he added. "Again it would be against the law to do it because you have got to investigate everybody involved in torture or in a conspiracy to order torture."

But Nadler is no dupe. He recognizes that this matter is complicated by politics. He says his major concern is not whether the Obama administration sees the legal rationale for such an investigation, but rather whether it has the political fortitude for tackling such a task.

"If you start prosecuting the Bush people," Nadler said, "you know what is going to be said? What's going to be said is, this is politically motivated payback for the Clinton impeachment. That is what they are going to say."

"And you know that if you do this, there is going to be a tremendous pushback starting with Fox News and everywhere else," he added, "not on the merits but on the political motivation of the Obama administration for vengeance... Who needs that? So from a political point of view it is the last thing you want to do. From a point of view of reestablishing justice in this country, it is essential."

Richard Valeriani: Aug. 17, 2009, News Update

2009-08-17T12:59:20Z

President Obama on the hustings, pitching health care reform. Anybody catching?

Town hall meetings on health care reform....Debate or Debacle? Media make sure squeakiest wheels get the grease.

Meetings degenerate into melees. Do you have the right to shout "ire" in a crowded town hall?

"Nazis," "Death Panels, "Socialism"....Ah, the joys of civil discourse in a democracy....

Wonder how many of those screaming about government involvement in health care are on Medicare....

New York Times headline: "Obama Taking An Active Role in Health Talks." Now there's news for you. Imagine that: President taking active role in central issue of his presidency.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell acknowledges he hasn't read health care reform bill....That's assuming he can read.

Millions of dollars spent on TV ads about health care reform...See, government stimulus plan working....

New Jersey and New York City have own stimulus plans -- Jon Corzine and Michael Bloomberg re-election campaigns....

Florida Sen. Mel Martinez quits before end of term. Who does he think he is, Sarah Palin?

Illinois Sen. Roland Burris, Obama's replacement in Senate, says he won't run for the seat.... Perhaps because he's only raised $875 for election campaign?

Sen. James Webb goes to Myanamar, secures release of jailed American citizen. Take that, Bill Clinton.

Myanamar regime sentences opposition leader and Nobel Peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi to 18 months of house arrest for some invented reason or other. But she's allowed to watch state TV. Now that's cruel and unusual punishment. (At what point do we stop saying, "Myanamar, which used to be called Burma?" You don't hear people go around saying, "Burkina Faso, formerly known as Republic of Upper Volta").

Vanity Fair intern assigned to watch nothing but cable "news" for a week. That's beyond cruel and unusual. That borders on waterboarding.

Speaking of which, reports say Guantanamo detainee waterboarded 183 times. At what point do you think he figured out he wasn't really going to be drowned?

CNN bans talk radio hosts from being booked on its TV shows. Now if there were only some way to ban talk radio hosts from being on radio shows.

Various sponsors, including Geico, pull the plug on whatever it is that Glen Beck does on Fox. Means Beck backers spared obnoxious gekko but still left with obnoxious host.

Media frenzied when Hillary Clinton, on African tour, asked what "President Clinton" thought about Congo-China deal and bristled, "I'm the Secretary of State. I'm not channeling my husband." Way to go, Hil. It's your turf and you defend it. Media ought to spend more time investigating town hall disruptions.

Government program works. "Cash for Clunkers" so successful it's refinanced. Any way to apply similar program to Congress?

General Motors selling cars on E-Bay. Could that work for health care reform?

Yahoo and Microsoft forge deal to compete better against Google. If you want more information on deal, Google it.

New York Giants QB Eli Manning gets contract making him highest paid QB in NFL. Take that, big brother.

Michael Vick hired by Philadelphia Eagles. Who says a black ex-con can't get a job?

Soap opera Guiding Light to go off air. Couldn't pay electric bill in hard economic times?

Faux humorist Ben Stein loses New York Times column over alleged conflict of interest. Not to mention lack of interest in his inane commentary and terminally boring manner.

Warren Holstein: Liz Cheney: Favorite Pretty Princess (VIDEO)

2009-08-14T14:10:08Z

Written and Performed by Ann Carr
Filmed and Directed by Warren Holstein

Chris Weigant: Obama's "Drip, Drip, Drip..." Intelligence Problem

2009-07-13T19:25:06Z

President Obama has always said he wants to look forward, not backward. This, when it comes to the actions of the previous administration, means Obama is content to just identify any problems with George Bush's (and Dick Cheney's) methods on security and intelligence matters, rectify any abuses and correct any mistakes, promise we'll never do it again, and move on. Obama has never advocated -- and, indeed, done what he could to discourage -- any sort of investigation into Bush's actions in response to 9/11 (some of which continued throughout Bush's two terms). Obama's opposition to such investigations has been steadfast and unwavering. He has even (now that he leads the executive branch himself) strongly argued in the courts against any examination of how executive branch power was used under Bush.

This is all understandable. In the first place, presidents always see executive power differently when they arrive in the White House. It's the nature of the job. So we shouldn't be all that surprised when a Justice Department lawyer argues in court in favor of secrecy in the executive branch -- even under President Obama. In the second place, this is a political loser for Obama, and he knows it. He does not want to look like a "sore winner" by digging through all the dirt Bush and Cheney left in their wake. Obama would prefer it if we could all just sweep it under the rug, and trust him when he says he's stopped doing all that bad stuff. "Nothing to see here, folks -- move along," in other words.

But by refusing to tackle the issue at all, Obama faces a steady drip, drip, drip of stories leaking and becoming public. Wiretapping stories, torture stories, and secret CIA covert stories were all in the news in the past week alone. I didn't feel that any of these stories were worth exploring today in depth, mostly because there isn't all that much depth yet. Details are slowly coming out. Until we know a lot more about each of them, it's impossible to draw any conclusions at this point.

Except for a few peripheral comments. Attorney General Eric Holder was the source for one of these stories, saying he is leaning towards appointing some sort of prosecutor to look into detainee abuse. There are several points worth making about this, without going in to too many details (since it was more of an offhand comment, details will be doubtlessly be forthcoming, but mostly don't exist yet).

The first point is that this is how things are supposed to work. Our last few Attorneys General may have caused everyone to forget how the system is supposed to work, so allow me to run it down. The Attorney General is, in essence, the chief prosecuting attorney in the country (a local equivalent would be a District Attorney, or "D.A."). Once appointed, he is supposed to work independently of the White House. The president can give his A.G. broad outlines (such as "Are we doing enough to police Wall Street?" for instance) but cannot order him to do specific things ("Prosecute Senator Beelzebub for corruption, now!"). If the president ever steps over this line (and they do, almost regularly), the A.G. either resigns or threatens to resign. If the president is a lunatic (see: Richard Nixon), then he fires his A.G. for not following his inappropriate orders (see: "Saturday Night Massacre"). The removal of the A.G., either by resigning or being fired, then becomes a political fracas for all to see. But, in normal times, the A.G. is independent. President Obama reminded everyone of this a few months ago, when asked whether he would tell Holder to investigate Bush's excesses, by basically responding: "That's the A.G.'s job, he makes those decisions."

This is the way it is supposed to work. The Justice Department looks into all kinds of criminal wrongdoing, including throughout the executive branch of the government. And it is up to the Attorney General to decide how to investigate such wrongdoing, and whether to prosecute it. Now, Obama has laid down his marker, and said that people (in the C.I.A., for instance) who were following what they considered legal orders will not be prosecuted for doing so. In other words, "I was just following orders" will be an acceptible legal defense (which is problematic in its own way, but understandable politically). Speculation began, after Holder's recent remarks, that what he was talking about were agents and other government officials who had overstepped even the lax guidelines which came out of Bush's Justice Department. But to date, this is merely speculation. Again, though, this is how it is supposed to work -- it's the Attorney General's decision to prosecute or investigate, not Barack Obama's.

The second incidental issue which arose from recent news stories came from the report that Leon Panetta, the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, just heard about a program which reported directly to the office of Dick Cheney, and had not been briefed to Congress. Panetta, if the timelines are to be believed, found out about the program a few weeks ago, immediately shut it down, and then briefed Congress the next day. This is all well and good, but raises a very important question (actually, it raises a whole flood of questions), which is mostly being ignored (except for this article on Time magazine's website) -- why was Panetta kept in the dark for four months? As D.C.I., Panetta is supposed to know everything his agency is doing. That's his job. And it took him four months to dig this out. Reportedly, this was because the program was "dormant," which is a partial excuse, but not much of one. As I said, the program itself will raise a flood of questions, and Congress is already expressing an interest in investigating this in both the House and Senate intelligence committees, but it also leads to one very important question -- what else has the C.I.A. been hiding from Panetta (and everyone else, apparently, not named "Dick Cheney")?

Which brings me back to my main point. Before everyone learned the definition of "waterboarding," playschool children talked of (often with an Asian country's name attached at the front) the "water torture." A prisoner would be strapped down, and a huge bucket suspended over their head. This bucket had a very slow leak in it, which resulted in a drop of water hitting the prisoner's forehead every couple of seconds. Its purpose was to drive the prisoner crazy waiting for the drops to hit, to the point where his will would break and he'd spill his guts.

This is exactly the sort of torture President Obama has chosen. If an independent "Truth Commission" had been set up (as Senate leader on the issue Patrick Leahy has been fighting for), it would have accomplished a few things politically -- it would have distanced Obama from the investigation ("The independent commission is looking into that, I am not going to comment until they have finished their work"); it would have been bipartisan, which would have avoided the cries of "Partisan witchhunt!" from across the aisle; it could have offered immunity to lower-level agents in exchange for honest testimony (avoiding the whole "I was only following orders" problem); and it would have gotten the whole story out there in one chunk. Sure, there would have been public hearings of the commission, and it would have generated a story now and then, but one of the reasons for appointing any commission in Washington is to distance yourself from the work of that commission, which would have been possible for Obama.

Since Obama didn't choose this route, one has to wonder if his entire presidency will be distracted by these stories over and over again throughout his term in office. Because things will leak. Journalists still occasionally do their job. This stuff does get out eventually. And, by assuring that each one will be a separate event, complete with its own small-scale media circus, these revelations will happen over and over again, instead of being tied into one all-encompassing investigation. Obama, by trying to politically avoid some of the stickier problems in dealing with his predecessor, may in fact suffer politically by the method he has chosen.

Because the result of the path Obama has charted was on display for all to see last week.

Drip, drip, drip.

Chris Weigant blogs at: ChrisWeigant.com

Jayne Lyn Stahl: What To Do With the Enablers?

2009-07-13T11:41:16Z

Senator Feinstein was right when she told Fox News on Sunday, that we have a "problem" with a vice president who orders the head of the Central Intelligence Agency not to disclose details of a secret "counterterrorism" program in violation of federal law. Yes, indeed we do, but the larger problem is what to do with those who enabled Dick Cheney, and continue to do so.

Say, for the sake of argument, that an indictment is issued against Dick Cheney and he gets to have his day in court and, say that the former vice president is convicted. This still doesn't solve the problem of what to do with those in the Bush administration who aided and abetted such egregious acts as torture, and warrantless eavesdropping, as well as the destruction of 5 million White House e-mails in violation of the Presidential Records Act.

The Obama administration can guarantee one new job for someone who would just keep track of all the laws that were bent, or outright broken, under George W. Bush starting with FISA, the Eighth Amendment proscription against cruel and unusual punishment, the Geneva Conventions, the 1947 national security provisions which required that Congress be briefed, and that's just for starters.

But, even if Dick Cheney gets to join the likes of Bernie Madoff, and spend what's left of his life in jail, we're still going to have to live with the aftershocks of the Bush years, the USA Patriot Act which, you'll recall, was finalized with Bush's reelection in 2004, as was the understated, but ever-present, police state we now consider the "new normal." Government hit squads a la Cheney, waterboarding, and indefinite detention are practices that have been outed, but only the most naive among us would believe they've been ruled out. One newspaper has already been made to recant a story it published, and that same newspaper's publisher just hosted a networking mixer for 350 former elected officials who have been outsourced as lobbyists for the private health care industry.

Yes, the enablers are alive and well when environmental activists from Greenpeace can be chained and handcuffed for hanging a banner warning about climate change on Mount Everest. The enablers are thriving when an Iraq veteran has his flag taken down by Wisconsin police for the simple act of hanging it upside down as a lawful means of protest. Whose dog ate the First Amendment?

In the end, it's not only about what commands the vice president gave to the CIA about what not to tell Congress in the Bush years, it's about what commands are being given now.

We must also look at those who suited up, at a hefty hourly rate, to defend Mr. Cheney in his egregious skirting, defying, and sodomizing of the Constitution and international law at taxpayer's expense.

Vigilance is required for President Obama, too, when he colludes with state secrets defense, jockeys to validate Bush's refusal to turn over hundreds of thousands of White House e-mails which miraculously reappeared. Vigilance is required when he aids and abets a legal black hole of limitless incarceration for those we detain on an ever expanding field of battle. These policies must come under the same scrutiny as those of Dick Cheney or, in the end, the enablers will prevail, and Dick Cheney will get a perennial get out of jail card.

I join those who call for accountability and justice. But, we must also work to ensure that the name on the door to the Oval Office isn't the only thing that has changed, and that Mr. Cheney's enablers have, once and for all, left town.

ABC News Reporter Tweets That Iranian Detainees Are Being Waterboarded [UPDATED]

2009-07-02T17:43:10Z

UPDATE: Days after writing this, it's hardly surprising to wake up and find that the New York Times has suddenly found a use for the word "torture," when previously, "enhanced interrogation techniques were the norm. Via Glenn Greenwald:

Time for a letter to Clark Hoyt, New York Times public editor!

Mr. Hoyt--

I wonder if you'd be good enough to explain something to me. Mere months ago, you said:

"Exactly what constitutes torture continues to be a matter of debate and hasn't been resolved by a court. This president and this attorney general say waterboarding is torture, but the previous president and attorney general said it is not. On what basis should a newspaper render its own verdict, short of charges being filed or a legal judgment rendered?" Jehl argued for precision and caution. I agree. "

Yet, today, you have a piece by Michael Slackman, summarized on your site as follows: "The Iranian government has made it a practice to publicize confessions from political prisoners, often subject to sleep deprivation, solitary confinement and torture, rights groups say." The article somehow manages to avoid classifying these techniques with the commonplace and widely accepted term "enhanced interrogation techniques."

According to recent precedents, established by the United States, a government has the leeway to subject people to "intense questioning" as a part of a response to their national security interests. I wonder if you could explain how the word "torture" came to be used in this instance. Has a "legal judgement" been rendered that I've not heard of? Under what distinction is the word "torture" used here?

I'd very much like an explanation.

We'll see what he says about this!

-----------

[h/t; The Daily Dish] From ABC News' Lara Setrakian, comes this tweet:

Tehrani source close to those detained says some have been beaten heavily and waterboarded with hot water #iranelection

In my younger years, I would simply expect this news to be greeted with universal outrage, knowing that the techniques being described had long been deemed to be well across the Bridge Too Far. Now that I've lived through the Bush administration, however, I am forced to contemplate the possibility that Iran is merely taking legitimate steps to obtain critical information in their nations' vital national security interests. One mustn't preclude the possibility that many of those being waterboarded are privy to information about "time bombs" that may, at this moment, be "ticking."

The whole matter could be investigated, I suppose, but I'm also forced to consider that once Iran is through this rough patch, it would be better if everyone involved just looked forward, not backward.

Anyway, I guess everyone's really playing follow-the-leader on this nation's innovations in the area of what our press calls "enhanced interrogation techniques." Pop champagne.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

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Andy Worthington: Release of the "Holy Grail" of Torture Reports Delayed Again

2009-07-01T19:31:46Z

Today was supposed to be the day that the Justice Department -- after two delays -- released an unclassified version of the CIA Inspector General's 2004 Report into the interrogations of "high-value detainees" in the "War on Terror," which Democrat Congressional staffers described as the "holy grail," according to Greg Sargent of the Plum Line, writing in May, "because it is expected to detail torture in unprecedented detail and to cast doubt on the claim that torture works."

Sargent was following up on an article in the Washington Post, "Hill Panel Reviewing CIA Tactics," which described how Senate Intelligence Committee investigators were interviewing those involved in the interrogations, "examining hundreds of CIA e-mails and reviewing a classified 2005 study by the agency's lawyers of dozens of interrogation videotapes" (which were later destroyed), and also examining the CIA Inspector General's Report.

The Post explained that "government officials familiar with the CIA's early interrogations" said that the "top secret" CIA report, "based on more than 100 interviews, a review of the videotapes and 38,000 pages of documents," contained "the most powerful evidence of apparent excesses," and added that the officials indicated that, although the report remained "closely held," White House officials had told political allies that they intended to "declassify it for public release when the debate quiets over last month's release of the Justice Department's interrogation memos." These four memos, issued by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel in 2002 and 2005, and released in April, provided a companion piece to the notorious "torture memo" of August 2002 (leaked in the wake of the Abu Ghraib scandal), and, notoriously, involved lawyers in one of the DoJ's most prestigious departments -- charged with interpreting the law as it applies to the Executive branch -- seeking to rewrite the rules on torture so that it could be used in the CIA's "high-value detainee" program.

According to the Post, officials familiar with the contents of the report said that it "concluded that some of the techniques appeared to violate the UN Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, ratified by the United States in 1994." The Post also added that, according to excerpts included in the OLC memos, the report "concluded that interrogators initially used harsh techniques against some detainees who were not withholding information."

This was a fair précis of the "excerpts" from the report that were included as footnotes in the three memos from May 2005, written by the OLC's Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, Steven G. Bradbury, but as I explained in an article at the time, when analyzed in the context of the memos, the "excerpts" were even more alarming.

To establish the context, the footnotes followed Bradbury's lame attempts to explain why it was "necessary to use the waterboard 'at least 83 times during August 2002,'" on Abu Zubaydah, and "183 times during March 2003" on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. This apparently involved an appraisal that "other ... methods are unlikely to elicit this information within the perceived time limit for preventing [an] attack" (in other words, the fictional ticking time-bomb scenario), but I was obliged to conclude that these "mind-boggling figures" seemed to reveal "not that each horrific round of near-drowning and panic, repeated over and over again, defused a single ticking time-bomb, but, instead, that it became a macabre compulsion on the part of the torturers, which led only to the countless false alarms reported by CIA and FBI officials who spoke to David Rose for Vanity Fair last December."

What amazed me, however, was that, while filling his memos with largely implausible justifications for the use of torture, Bradbury cited from the Inspector General's Report, even though it was so clearly critical of the manner in which interrogations had been conducted. These are the key passages from my article at the time:

One sign that this was indeed the case [in other words, that the CIA overreacted] comes in a disturbing footnote, in which Bradbury noted, "This is not to say that the interrogation program has worked perfectly. According to the IG Report, the CIA, at least initially, could not always distinguish detainees who had information but were successfully resisting interrogation from those who did not actually have the information ... on at least one occasion, this may have resulted in what might be deemed in retrospect to have been the unnecessary use of enhanced techniques. On that occasion, although the on-scene interrogation team judged Zubaydah to be compliant, elements within CIA Headquarters still believed he was withholding information [passage redacted]. At the direction of CIA headquarters, interrogators therefore used the waterboard one more time on Zubaydah [passage redacted]."

Furthermore, as another revealing footnote makes clear, the IG Report also noted that, "in some cases the waterboard was used with far greater frequency than initially indicated," and also that it was "used in a different manner" than the technique described in the DoJ opinion and used in SERE training [the torture techniques taught in US military schools to enable US personnel to resist interrogation, which were reverse engineered for use in the "War on Terror"]. As the report explained, "The difference was in the manner in which the detainees' breathing was obstructed. At the SERE school and in the DoJ opinion, the subject's airflow is disrupted by the firm application of a damp cloth over the air passages; the interrogator applies a small amount of water to the cloth in a controlled manner. By contrast, the Agency interrogator ... applied large volumes of water to a cloth that covered the detainee's mouth and nose. One of the psychiatrist / interrogators acknowledged that the Agency's use of the technique is different from that used in SERE training because it is 'for real' and is more poignant and convincing."

In addition, the IG Report noted that the OMS, the CIA's Office of Medical Services, contended that "the experience of the SERE psychologist / interrogators on the waterboard was probably misrepresented at the time, as the SERE waterboard experience is so different from the subsequent Agency usage as to make it almost irrelevant." Chillingly, the report continued, "Consequently, according to OMS, there was no a priori reason to believe that applying the waterboard with the frequency and intensity with which it was used by the psychologist/interrogators was either efficacious or medically safe."

I'm not surprised that the release of the report -- delayed for a week from June 19, at the CIA's request, and again from June 26 to July 1 -- has been delayed again, as it clearly contains information that is vital to those of who believe that President Obama cannot "restore America's moral stature in the world" (as he pledged in November) without holding to account those who authorized the use of torture by US personnel. However, every delay only increases the fear that, on arrival, the report will be barely less comprehensively redacted than the laughably censored version that was released to the ACLU in May 2008 (PDF).

In order to keep the debate about torture alive, I therefore recommend a visit to the ACLU's "Accountability for Torture" project, which has been running for the last few weeks, and which states, "We can't sweep the abuses of the last eight years under the rug. Accountability for torture is a legal, political, and moral imperative." I also recommend a number of articles from the last few days, as part of what blogger and psychologist Jeff Kaye has described as "a mini-blog storm on behalf of the ACLU's Accountability Project," looking at how the Bush administration's torture program was not just reserved for the waterboarding of three "high-value detainees" in the custody of the CIA, but was a poisonous virus that also infected the US military, and that led to over a hundred deaths in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

First up is Glenn Greenwald's article for his blog at Salon, "The suppressed fact: Deaths by US torture," in which he states, "Those arguing against investigations and prosecutions -- that we "Look to the Future, not the Past" -- are literally advocating that numerous people get away with murder." Then there are articles by Marcy Wheeler, bmaz and Jeff Kaye at Firedoglake, by Digby, and by drational and mcjoan at Daily Kos, and there's also my article, "When Torture Kills: Ten Murders In US Prisons In Afghanistan," which draws largely on passages in my book The Guantánamo Files, but also on testimony by former Guantánamo prisoner Omar Deghayes, and researcher John Sifton, and which, I believe, exposes three murders at the US prison at Bagram airbase that have never been investigated.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America's Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and maintains a blog here.

CIA Report Release Delayed Again

2009-07-01T17:00:53Z

The Justice Department has once again delayed the release of the CIA's internal investigation of its controversial interrogation and detention program.

Advocacy Groups Say Torture Memo Authors Should Be Disbarred

2009-06-29T17:01:37Z

WASHINGTON — A coalition of advocacy groups is asking the District of Columbia and New York bar associations to disbar three government attorneys for approving and enabling the CIA's harsh interrogation program.

The groups are asking the legal panels to revoke the district law licenses of acting CIA general counsel John Rizzo and former CIA Counterterrorism Center chief counsel Jonathan Fredman, and the New York license of former CIA General Counsel Scott W. Muller.

Andy Worthington: Never Forget: The International Day in Support of Victims of Torture

2009-06-26T10:06:57Z

Eleven years ago, the United Nations designated June 26 as the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. Then-Secretary General Kofi Annan explained, "This is a day on which we pay our respects to those who have endured the unimaginable. This is an occasion for the world to speak up against the unspeakable. It is long overdue that a day be dedicated to remembering and supporting the many victims and survivors of torture around the world." He added, "June 26 is not a date chosen at random. It was the day, 11 years ago, that the Convention against Torture came into force. It was also the day, 53 years ago, that the United Nations Charter was signed -- the first international instrument to embody obligations for Member States to promote and encourage respect for human rights."

As Navi Pillay, the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, explained in a speech reproduced in today's Daily Star, Lebanon, "The prohibition of torture is one of the most absolute to be found anywhere in international law. Article 2 of the Convention against Torture is unequivocal: 'No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.'"

She continued: "A total of 146 states have ratified the Convention against Torture (CAT) in the 25 years since it was adopted in 1984 -- in other words, three-quarters of the world's states." However, as she also explained, "Many states that have ratified CAT continue to practice torture, some of them daily. Others, which do not practice it themselves, enable it to happen by sending people at risk back to states where they know torture is carried out. This, too, is clearly prohibited by CAT (Article 3)," which states that "No State Party shall expel, return ('refouler') or extradite a person to another State where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture."

The High Commissioner proceeded to explain how "The acts of terrorism that shook the world on September 11, 2001 had a devastating impact on the fight to eliminate torture," as "some states that had previously been careful not to practice or condone torture became less scrupulous. State lawyers began to look for ingenious ways to get round CAT, or stretch its boundaries. The Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib prisons, in particular, became high-profile symbols of this regression, and new terms such as 'water-boarding' and 'rendition' entered the public discourse, as human rights lawyers and advocates looked on in dismay."

According to Pillay, the worst excesses of the Bush years may now be coming to an end. "I believe we are finally starting to turn the page on this extremely unfortunate chapter of recent history," she explained, "with counter-terrorism measures starting to move back in to line with international human rights standards." However, she added that "Leadership is required to end this grotesque practice. In January, I welcomed the fact that Barack Obama's very first actions as the new US president included decisions to close Guantánamo and ban methods of interrogation, such as water-boarding, which amount to torture or otherwise contravene international law. He has set an example of what a leader can do, in terms of policy and practice, to uphold the total prohibition on torture."

"But," she continued, "there is still much to do before the Guantánamo chapter is truly brought to a close. Its remaining inmates must either be tried before a court of law -- like any other suspected criminal -- or set free. Those at risk of torture or other ill-treatment in their countries of origin must be given a new home, where they can start to build a new life, in the U.S. or elsewhere. I welcome the fact that in recent weeks a number of countries have agreed to take in a few people in this position, and urge others to follow suit, including first and foremost the United States itself."

Addressing President Obama's proposal to push for new legislation endorsing "preventive detention" -- in other words, continuing to imprison people without charge or trial, on the basis that there is insufficient evidence to try them, or that the evidence is tainted by the use of torture -- the High Commissioner was rightly indignant. "There should be no half-measures, or new creative ways to treat people as criminals when they have not been found guilty of any crime," she said. "Guantánamo showed that torture and unlawful forms of detention can all too easily creep back into practice during times of stress, and there is still a long way to go before the moral high ground lost since September 11 can be fully reclaimed."

Today, sadly, our celebrity-obsessed world is unlikely to pay much attention to the International Day in Support of the Victims of Torture, as the death of Michael Jackson dominates headlines around the world, and the public's tendency to let the allure of celebrity erase concerns about the moral failings of stars, and what the cult of celebrity does to people, will be on full display instead.

Nevertheless, Navi Pillay is to be thanked for raising the issue of America's moral leadership on this important day, and for congratulating Barack Obama on making a promising start, but warning that much more needs to be done. As well as highlighting the terrifying notion of endorsing "preventive detention," she was, I believe, correct in stating that "first and foremost" the Obama administration should take responsibility for the injustices perpetrated by its predecessor, and should accept cleared prisoners into the United States.

Moreover, as recent events have shown, President Obama also needs to open up the prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan to some form of outside scrutiny -- and, in a limited number of cases, to the U.S. courts -- and, as a recent court case revealed, he also needs to speed up plans to release prisoners, and would do well to accompany this with bold statements renouncing the failures of the Bush administration's "War on Terror" detention policies.

On Bagram, the Obama administration has already lost credibility by refusing to accept, as Judge John D. Bates ruled three months ago, that foreign prisoners -- seized outside Afghanistan and rendered to Bagram, where they have been held for up to seven years -- have the same legal rights as the prisoners in Guantánamo. As Judge Bates explained in his ruling, the habeas rights granted by the Supreme Court to the Guantánamo prisoners last June in Boumediene v. Bush also extend to the foreign prisoners in Bagram, because "the detainees themselves as well as the rationale for detention are essentially the same."

This is undoubtedly true, and it is, indeed, little more than an administrative accident that the foreign prisoners at Bagram -- perhaps around 30 of the total population of 650 -- did not end up in Guantánamo. However, although Judge Bates did not extend rights to Afghans held in a war zone -- who should be treated as prisoners of war, in accordance with the Geneva Conventions -- President Obama needs to make clear that this is, in fact, what is happening, and that the BBC's recent report about the abuse suffered by several dozen Afghan prisoners, who were held at Bagram between 2002 and 2008, refers not to current conditions at the prison, but to the years when former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld sanctioned the use of torture by the U.S. military. Without some form of transparency, the fear is that the abusive regime initiated by Rumsfeld is still in existence, and that Obama's fine talk of banning torture and reinstating is nothing more than hot air.

On Guantánamo, Obama needs to move fast if he is to preserve any credibility, because the administration's most recent court defeat -- in the case of Abdul Rahim al-Ginco, a Syrian prisoner -- is demonstrably humiliating. On Monday, Judge Richard Leon (an appointee of George W. Bush) demolished the government's case, and was clearly incredulous that the government thought it could establish that al-Ginco had some sort of ongoing relationship with al-Qaeda and/or the Taliban when, having spent three weeks in a guest house and training camp in 2000, he was then suspected of spying, tortured by al-Qaeda for three months, and imprisoned by the Taliban for a further 18 months, until his "liberation" by U.S. forces, and his transfer to Guantánamo.

Al-Ginco's case is just the latest in a series of court humiliations which also revealed that, essentially, Eric Holder's Justice Department was doing nothing more than attempting to defend the Bush administration's idiotic detention policies on a case-by-case basis, pursuing worthless and unjust cases in which its only evidence, as Judge Gladys Kessler pointed out in another recent ruling, in the case of a Yemeni, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, consisted of "unreliable allegations made by other prisoners who were tortured, coerced, bribed or suffering from mental health issues, and a 'mosaic' of intelligence, purporting to rise to the level of evidence, which actually relied, to an intolerable degree, on second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions."

These are not the only issues that President Obama needs to address urgently. He also needs to think hard about whether it is feasible to make a stand against torture while refusing to investigate those who authorized its use during the Bush years, and also needs to reflect on the significance of his opposition to a lawsuit brought by the ACLU against Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., a Boeing subsidiary that acted as the CIA's travel agent for torture.

To highlight this issue, the ACLU posted an interview yesterday with the wife of Abou Elkassim Britel, one of five prisoners in the Jeppesen case, who is currently languishing in a Moroccan jail, having been initially picked up in Pakistan and rendered to Morocco by the CIA.

The interview is part of a two-week project, "Accountability for Torture," that was initiated by the ACLU in the run-up to the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture. This has featured a podcast with Glenn Greenwald and Philippe Sands, and articles by several experts on torture including Dr. Stephen Soldz, who wrote about the American Psychological Association's collusion in the use of torture. Later today I'll also be posting my own contribution, an analysis of how the Bush administration's torture regime included not only the water-boarding and other "enhanced interrogation techniques" used on so-called "high-value detainees" and the reverse-engineered torture techniques taught in U.S. military schools, which were implemented throughout the "War on Terror," in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantánamo, but also the brutal force-feeding of hunger-striking prisoners in Guantánamo, which continues to this day.

Former Waterboarders Join The Ranks Of The Unemployed (And The Rest Of Your Scritti Politti)

2009-06-16T19:06:18Z

Ahh, this recession. It's brought so many people so much misery, what with the rampant unemployment and the fact that we're all not eligible for TARP bailouts, for some reason. But I wonder who will spare a thought for the recently unemployed waterboarding experts? You've heard of James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, right? One day, they're straight up dunking terrorists, to find ticking time bombs. The next, they're just like everyone else, hunting for a job!

The CIA has reportedly cut its ties to the two psychologists credited for being the architects of the CIA's brutal interrogation program after 9/11, a news report said yesterday. Dr. James Mitchell and Dr. Bruce Jessen, who suggested and supervised waterboarding at secret prisons around the world have been told their services are no longer needed. Mitchell and Jessen, according to their associates, boasted of being paid $1,000 a day by the CIA to oversee the use of the technique on top al Qaeda suspects.

Boasted! Hey, you would too! All that scrilla was "largely tax-free and did not include expenses, which the agency also paid for."

Nice work if you can get it, though you shouldn't be able to, because it's completely deranged!

MORE:

Tax-free No-bid Cost-plus Government Contracts

PREVIOUSLY, on the HUFFINGTON POST:
CIA Renewed Contract With Psychologists Who Endorsed Waterboarding Weeks After Obama Took Office Before Firing Them

More Free Speech: Here's an alternative take on Frank Gaffney, from Michael Roston, that asks, "Frank Gaffney's entire body composed of flesh-eating locusts?" I have often found myself wondering this!

Guess What Media Organization Is Nearby!: At last, the secret Sarah Palin shrine at the New York Stock Exchange has been revealed!

Only Full Voting Rights Shall Assuage Their Fury: Apparently, nobody is safe in Washington, DC, because all the drivers are rage-soaked fever demons with a lead foot and nothing to lose. According to a drivers' survey, "Four percent of drivers admitted to slamming into another driver." WTF? What happened to Hope and Change? (ANSWER: The Beltway.)

Maybe That 4% Of Drivers Was Just Monica Conyers: No, she lives in Detroit, but it's sort of the same concept.

[Would you like to follow me on Twitter? Because why not? Also, please send tips to tv@huffingtonpost.com -- learn more about our media monitoring project here.]

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UK Waterboarding: 6 Police Under Scrutiny

2009-06-11T09:40:30Z

By Cahal Milmo | The Independent

Six Scotland Yard detectives could face the sack and criminal charges over claims that they subjected suspected drug dealers to water torture.

Investigators are expected to interview the officers under caution by the end of this month as part of an inquiry into allegations that up to five people had their heads submerged in water containers during raids on two north London houses last November.

An internal report into the allegations by the Yard's Directorate of Professional Standards (DPS), the anti-corruption arm of the Metropolitan Police, used the term "waterboarding" to describe the alleged violence, although it is understood the claims do not relate to an exact copy of the CIA-sanctioned controlled drowning technique that became notorious in Guantanamo Bay.

The five people arrested - Victoria Seabrook, David Nwankwo, Ajah Mpakaboari, Nicholas Oforka and Bernasko Adji - were due to face trial in March on charges of importing cannabis.

During a police raid of houses in Enfield and Tottenham on 4 November, Mr Nwankwo, 24, is understood to have told a friend that officers thrust his head down a toilet in the house and repeatedly flushed it while he was questioned. Mr Mpakaboari, 33, claimed to have arrived at the police station in Edmonton, north London, with visible signs of having been assaulted. Ms Seabrook and her boyfriend, Mr Oforka, have not made any allegations of maltreatment.

The torture allegations are part of a wider inquiry by the Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) into claims that officers based at Edmonton Police Station fabricated evidence and stole property from suspects.

The investigation, which the Met referred to the IPCC after a complaint from another officer sparked its own inquiry, is potentially the most damaging scandal yet to confront the new Commissioner, Sir Paul Stephenson. A Met source said: "This is just about as bad as it gets in terms of allegations. We cannot be seen as torturers."

Such was the seriousness of the allegations that a prosecution of the five suspects, who were charged with illegal importation of cannabis, was abandoned in March at a secret court hearing. A Crown Prosecution Service spokesman said: "We took the decision to offer no evidence in this case at trial as it would not be in the public interest to proceed. To do so would have compromised a wide-ranging criminal investigation into a number of police officers."

The Yard said it was taking a tough approach to the allegations. Sir Paul has introduced a new doctrine of "intrusive supervision" in the Met and it is understood the DPS investigation involved the bugging and surveillance of officers in the Edmonton police station.

It was announced yesterday that the Enfield borough commander, Chief Superintendent Adrian Hanstock, had been transferred to Scotland Yard in a new role. There is no suggestion he was implicated in the alleged wrongdoing.

In March, he downplayed the nature of the corruption inquiry, which at that time was focused on property claims, saying it was not of the level portrayed in a BBC drama about 1970s policing.

He said: "We're not talking about Life On Mars-style corruption. This is about procedural compliance."

If the accusations are proven against the officers, who are of detective sergeant rank or below and have been suspended or placed on restricted duties since February, the sanctions available to the Yard include summary dismissal. Once the IPCC investigation is complete, a report will be sent to the Crown Prosecution Service stating whether evidence exists for criminal charges.

The IPCC said it had conducted house-to-house enquiries at the two addresses which were searched on 4 November last year. A spokesman said: "This is an ongoing criminal investigation and as such all six officers will be criminally interviewed under caution."

Jenny Jones, from the Metropolitan Police Authority, said: "The police should be a public protector, ensuring community safety, not an organisation that uses criminal torture tactics."

Turbulent times: Sir Paul Stephenson

28 November 2008 Shadow Immigration minister Damian Green is arrested at the Commons during an investigation into leaked Whitehall documents. Sir Paul, then deputy commissioner, sanctioned the arrest.

1 January 2009 Following the resignation of Sir Ian Blair, Sir Paul is appointed Met Commissioner.

13/26 March The Yard refers its investigations into two serial rapists, taxi driver John Worboys and football coach Kirk Reid, to the IPCC after it emerges opportunities were missed to arrest both men.

1 April Protests at the G20 summit lead to multiple allegations of police brutality and a manslaughter inquiry following the death of Ian Tomlinson.

9 April Assistant Commissioner Bob Quick, Britain's most senior counter-terrorism officer, resigns after he is photographed with secret documents.

10 June Corruption probe launched following torture claims.

Read more from The Independent.

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Football Team Waterboarded To Make "Political Point" In Gay Pride Film

2009-06-11T09:30:25Z

A Canadian filmaker has made a movie for Gay Pride Week featuring football players getting waterboarded with rainbow-colored underwear covering their noses and mouths, Towleroad reports.

The movie is called "No Safe Words," a reference to S & M culture, and director Noam Gonick said he intended to make a political point by using the waterboarding imagery.

Canadian gay lesbian news source xtra.ca spoke to Gonick about the film:

The military, says Gonick, "uses homoerotic, aggressive acts to harm victims and act as a contagion to society in general."

And, he says, it turns us on. "Conquest is not only about territory, or oil, or puppet dictatorships," he says. "It's sexual, too."

Gonick says the film is supposed to draw an analogy to the "conformity" of the gay community.

"It's about us and who we've become," he says. "We're willing to do anything to get the approval of the state."

Watch a clip from the film:

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