The Toronto Star sent a reporter to a "Spy Cruise" gathering of intelligence community types, which included former CIA Director Porter Goss and former NSA Director Michael Hayden, and landed some revealing quotes:
About 30 minutes into an interview on an outdoor deck aboard the "spy cruise," the issue of Osama bin Laden arises.
"What can you do with him?" asks Porter Goss, the former head of the CIA, as he settles back in a padded lounge chair.
"Are we going to sit him on a deckchair and ask him to cooperate? Or are we going to put him in a place where he can't leave?"
Goss's point is this: Now that the Obama administration has outlawed harsh interrogation techniques such as waterboarding, shut the CIA covert "black sites" around the world and frowned upon renditions, what are the options open to America's intelligence service?
He insists the CIA "enhanced" methods worked.
"There are undeniable, provable, extraordinary successes," Goss said when asked about waterboarding - an interrogation technique that U.S. President Barack Obama denounced as torture.
The whole article is worth reading (it's not lengthy) as a revealing look at the incredible obstinancy of the anything-for-national-defence crowd as represented by the two keynote speakers to this floating conference. As much as I agree with the main thrust of Glenn Greenwald's criticism of the Obama administration on these issues, it might amaze anyone who hasn't watched the way the right operates to see how completely unmoved they are toward the many ways in which Obama has compromised core civil liberties and US treaty obligations. If Obama listened to the left, Goss and Hayden would likely be in jail, rather than carping about him from the deck of a luxury cruise ship.
On a political tactical level, this highlights the futility of trying to placate these extremists since they can't be assauged by anything short of utter capitulation and meanwhile it just puts off Obama's own natural allies and base. That said, obviously these decisions shouldn't be made on the basis of political tactics, but it's worth noting that if that was the real rationale (since the Obama admin's given rationale on so many of their compromises on this front don't make much sense in policy terms), it's not working.
It also bolsters the need for stronger political oversight of these organizations as Hayden hides behind an astonishingly narrow technocratic view of his role, acting as he or other intelligence officials who participated in the widescale violation of US and international law bear no responsibility for the harm to the US from those actions. But then this is Hayden's perspective:
Hayden said he is tired of the criticism and doesn't believe the CIA's use of waterboarding or covert interrogation sites affected the U.S.'s reputation or fuelled Al Qaeda's propaganda.
Two days ago, the New York Times reported on the just-released publication of a 2008 report on the CIA's negligence, deceit, disregard for its own rules and stonewalling in connection with investigation of its practice of shooting down airplanes in Peru in 2001. Back then, it was deadly mistakes made in the war on drugs.
A day later, the Wall Street Journal published a report about ramping up the CIA's targeted killing program in the war against terrorism (or against Al Qaida, as the Administration now calls it).
The Peru example underscores why the United States should not be using the CIA to conduct targeted killings. The CIA operates, understandably, in secret. When and if its conduct is investigated, the reports of its violations usually remain secret as well. The power to impose death should not be delegated to an entity, and to individuals, so shielded from standard measures of accountability.
Most people don't even realize it, but an alleged al Qaeda terrorist - deemed among the most dangerous terrorists in US custody by US counterterrorism officials - has been quietly appearing in a U.S. federal court in downtown Manhattan for pretrial hearings for weeks now. His trial is scheduled to start there next week. And as the Wall Street Journal notes today, the NYPD - who are the national experts on counterterrorism security - don't see any need for extra funds to buttress their normal security procedures.
That's a far cry from the $200 million the police department said last year it would need to secure the trial of some other alleged al Qaeda operatives: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-conspirators in the 9/11 attack.
Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani is being tried for his role in an earlier al Qaeda terrorist attack on U.S. interests: the bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa in 1998. He was considered so important to al Qaeda that after he was captured in Pakistan in 2004, he was subjected to so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" in CIA "black sites" while interrogators pumped him for information. He was only transferred from the Guantanamo Bay prison camp to a New York prison for civilian trial last year.
Critics of the Obama administration's decision to use civilian trials for alleged terrorists claim, among other things, that trial and imprisonment in the United States pose a major security threat. But according to Devlin Barrett and Sean Gardiner in today's Journal:
The New York Police Department plans some behind-the-scenes security adjustments for Mr. Ghailani's trial, but there will be no street closures or extra officers assigned to security outside the courthouse.
For anyone who actually lives in New York and knows what the downtown courthouse area is like, that makes perfect sense. Ever since the September 11 terrorist attacks, the NYPD has stepped up its patrols and security in the area. There are now concrete barriers around all federal buildings that make it impossible for someone to drive a bomb up anywhere near them. Security entering the courthouse has always been tight, which makes sense, given that the Manhattan courthouse has long been the primary location for terrorist trials.
The problem with the plan to try KSM and his alleged associated there wasn't that New York City lacked sufficient security; it was that political opponents of the Obama Administration turned the trial into a political tool they could use to undermine the administration. And once opponents like Liz Cheney whipped some locals up into a frenzy about the need to close streets and add security, downtown businesses got scared about how that all might affect their bottom line.
The truth is, as the Ghailani trial demonstrates, that the NYPD and federal prison guards are fully capable of securing the massive stone courthouse and adjacent high-security prison that's long housed suspected terrorists safely. We neither need to shut down the city nor spend another $200 million to accomplish that.
The New York Times today highlights a new report released by ProPublica and the National Law Journal concluding that torture and "enhanced interrogation techniques" approved by the Bush Administration and used on suspected terrorists has made it impossible to bring many of those alleged terrorists to justice.
Of the 53 habeas corpus cases brought by Guantanamo detainees and decided by federal court judges, the government has lost 37. Many of those losses were because the only evidence against the detainee was a coerced confession or statements from other prisoners who'd been tortured. Federal court judges have rightly found such statements unreliable and inadmissible. The result is that many of those suspects have won orders of release. (Only three have actually been freed.)
Unfortunately, those orders have led some critics of the administration - including Sen. Lindsey Graham and Brookings Institution commentator Benjamin Wittes - to argue that we need more expansive detention laws so the government doesn't have to let those suspects go. That's precisely the wrong response in a society that claims to presume suspects are innocent until actually proven guilty. (The standard in habeas cases is actually much lower than in a criminal case; the government only has to prove that it's "more likely than not" that the suspect can legally be detained.) Those 37 prisoners won their habeas cases because the government had no reliable evidence that they'd been fighting for al Qaeda or the Taliban. So judges across the political spectrum concluded that the government hadn't demonstrated that these detainees are detainable under the laws of war.
In a report Human Rights First released with The Constitution Project in June, 16 former federal judges explained that the courts deciding these habeas cases are doing the right thing: they're weighing the evidence, deciding the facts and applying the law. No new laws are needed. On the contrary, a new detention law designed to help the government win more cases in the absence of reliable evidence would only tarnish the reputation of the U.S. justice system, which in these cases is doing itself proud.
As the Times points out, these court decisions demonstrate a "respect for due process [that] will help repair this country's battered reputation." The Bush administration's failure to apply basic, longstanding American justice standards is what landed us in this mess in the first place, requiring that some terror suspects go free. Creating a new legal standard to accommodate those past mistakes would only compound the problem and drive the United States' reputation further into the ground.
We're already seeing that happen at the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay. Although, as Peter Finn in the Washington Post today points out, many of the military commission cases have stalled, one that has gone forward recently produced a highly questionable ruling that was immediately broadcast around the world.
In the case of a Canadian citizen and alleged child soldier, Omar Khadr, the judge ruled that a threat of gang-rape and murder in prison from his lead interrogator did not taint any of the 15-year-old's later "confessions" that he threw a grenade that killed a U.S. soldier. Given that there's no physical evidence that Khadr committed the act, his statements to interrogators at the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and later at Guantanamo Bay are critical to the prosecution.
In a similar case, brought against Mohammed Jawad, also accused of throwing a grenade at U.S. soldiers as a child, the military commission judge in 2008 concluded that early threats by Afghan interrogators tainted all of Jawad's later statements made to the Americans. His case was ultimately thrown out and he was returned to Afghanistan.
These sorts of conflicting rulings can happen in the military commissions, an ad hoc justice system created in fits and starts over the last eight years with no binding precedent or road-tested rules. It's one reason why those military commissions lack the legitimacy of civilian federal courts.
Like the court rulings ordering Guantanamo detainees freed, the military commissions, too, are a legacy of torture. They're an attempt to patch together a quasi-justice system to accommodate, without acknowledging or rectifying, the egregious mistakes of the past.
But neither new detention rules nor military commissions can truly overcome torture's legacy. That can only be done by admitting what happened, holding perpetrators accountable, and ultimately, prosecuting terror suspects in our time-tested, world-renowned American justice system. And that is rightly something about which this country can be proud.
Today's report that the CIA possesses videotapes of interrogations of alleged 9/11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh in a secret prison in Morocco is renewing attention to the government's abusive interrogations practiced in secret prisons around the world as part of its "war on terror." But U.S. officials are already saying that the tapes, which have not been publicly released, don't actually show any abuse.
"The tapes record a guy sitting in a room just answering questions," a U.S. official told the Associated Press, which broke the story.
That may be true. But even if the two videos and one audiotape of Bin al shibh's interrogation in Morocco show largely benign interrogations, that shouldn't distract attention from the fact that we know that many of the videotapes that the CIA did successfully destroy in 2005 documented serious abuse. Those destroyed tapes include 92 interrogation videos of two other alleged al Qaeda operatives, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Nashiri, both of whom were subjected by CIA operatives to a form of torture known as waterboarding - a controlled drowning intended as a death threat. Abu Zubaydah, we know from Justice Department memos and the diligent blogger Marcy Wheeler, was waterboarded at least 83 times in August 2002 alone.
And as Wheeler aptly points out today, we don't know what parts of those interrogations were not videotaped in that Moroccan prison, or elsewhere. (The AP has a helpful timeline of BinalShibh's custody in various CIA "black sites" here.) The former British captive Binyam Mohamed, Wheeler notes, has claimed that he was brutally tortured for months in that same Moroccan prison around the same time.
The latest set of tapes was accidentally discovered in 2007, tucked under a desk in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, the AP reported today. The U.S. government twice told a federal judge that they did not exist.
Justice Department prosecutor John Durham is already investigating whether destroying the Zubaydah and al-Nashiri tapes was illegal. He's now also probing why the Binalshibh interrogation tapes were never disclosed. Durham is also tasked with a preliminary investigation into whether CIA interrogators broke the law by torturing, threatening and otherwise abusing terror suspects under their control. He has yet to release any of his findings.
The Supreme Court's refusal this week to hear the claims of Maher Arar, a Canadian sent to Syria to be interrogated under torture in 2002, is appropriately being condemned as another example of the U.S. avoiding any legal or moral responsibility for government- sanctioned torture.
What seems to shock and outrage people about the Arar case in particular is that the facts are not in dispute. Canada, whose security services were complicit in his rendition to Syria, has publicly acknowledged its responsibility, compensated Arar,and launched a criminal investigation of U.S. and Syrian officials. The United States, on the other hand, has still neither admitted its role nor held any U.S. officials accountable. And, it hasn't paid Arar a dime.
The United States' refusal to acknowledge its role in the torture of terrorism suspects even when faced with overwhelming evidence of U.S. involvement has become an unfortunate pattern. But it's heartening to see that other countries aren't dropping the matter.
On Monday, the European Court of Human Rights announced that it would hear the case of Khaled el-Masri, a German citizen seized by Macedonian authorities at the request of the United States. El-Masri was beaten and abused during interrogations in both Macedonia and the notorious "Salt Pit" in Afghanistan. Authorities unceremoniously dumped him on a roadside in Albania without charging him with any wrongdoing.His case against U.S. officials was dismissed by a federal court on the grounds that it would reveal "state secrets." The Bush and Obama Administrations have both invoked State Secrets to stop the disclosure of evidence that may reveal government misconduct.
And last year, an Italian court convicted 21 alleged CIA operatives and a US air force operator for their role in the kidnapping and rendition to Egypt of Abu Omar, a Muslim cleric who was already under surveillance by Italian authorities, who suspected him of having ties to al Qaeda. Omar claims he was held incommunicado and tortured in an Egyptian prison for seven months. He was eventually released without charge.
The Obama administration has repeatedly insisted that it wants to look forward, not backward, and so has refused to examine the role of senior U.S. officials in the torture of terrorism suspects. In adopting that position, the government is reneging on its obligations under the Convention Against Torture, which demands both that torturers be held accountable and that victims receive remedies.
Until the U.S. lives up to those responsibilities, its past practices and officers will continue to be scrutinized by foreign governments and justice systems. Those verdicts will cast judgment not only on the past administration's conduct, however. To the extent that foreign governments have to intervene to bring justice to victims of U.S. policies, they will reveal the extent of the United States' current respect for the rule of law as well.
First, on Thursday, the Senate Armed Services Committee passed a bill to stop the Obama administration from purchasing a new prison that could house detainees now at the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay under lock and key here in the United States.
Then on Friday, just as the Memorial Day weekend got underway, the House of Representatives voted to stop the president from transferring any of the Guantanamo detainees to the United States for any reason - including a trial.
But then on Saturday, the Washington Post reported that actually, only about 10 percent of the 240 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay when President Obama took office were "leaders, operatives and facilitators involved in plots against the United States." The majority were merely low-level fighters. About 5 percent of the prisoners couldn't be categorized as anything at all.
The report was based on the findings of the administration's Guantanamo Review Task Force, provided to the administration last January. Those findings were never released publicly, and only sent to select committees on Capitol Hill last week. The administration reportedly didn't share the information earlier because, in the wake of the failed Christmas-day bombing attempt, members of Congress had displayed little to no interest in closing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp.
Last week's events reveal that many members of Congress continue to show little interest in the real facts about Guantanamo and the detainees held there. How else to explain the stubborn refusal to allow any of them to touch United States soil, even to stand trial, regardless of whether there's any reason to believe that they're actually terrorists?
The Obama administration's task force that deemed most of them low-level foot soldiers was made up of more than 60 career professionals -- including intelligence analysts, law enforcement agents and prosecutors. They reviewed capture information, interview reports, CIA, FBI and NSA records, as well as files on the detainees' behavior since their imprisonment. Notably, the Bush administration hadn't even bothered to look at much of this evidence, the task force reported, so last year was the first time it had been systematically compiled and reviewed. Senior officials from six different agencies, including the defense department and Homeland Security, approved the task force's findings.
Still, that seems to be having little impact on the 282 lawmakers who voted to ban them all from coming to the U.S. for trial. Many persist in portraying all of the 180 remaining detainees as "the worst of the worst," as former defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld called them.
"We can't stop every terrorist from coming to the United States but we can stop the ones that are coming from Guantanamo," said Rep. Randy J. Forbes, the Virginia Republican who offered the House amendment prohibiting the movement of detainees to the United States.
Meanwhile, a long list of retired military leaders have said that keeping the Guantanamo Bay detention center open threatens national security, rather than improving it.
While members of Congress blow hot air about threats they imagine from suspected terrorists confined in Supermax prisons on U.S. soil, they continue to ignore some very real national security dangers that they have the ability to do something about. As the New York Times pointed out over the weekend, Congress has failed to streamline its oversight of national intelligence and refused to prohibit or even adequately regulate companies' use of toxic gases that could easily be weaponized by terrorists for use in a future attack.
It's high time for lawmakers to stop posturing around imaginary threats, which prevents the federal government from bringing actual terrorists to justice and releasing those who don't deserve to be in prison. That - coupled with tackling tangible threats to homeland security that loom right here in our own country - would be the real way to enhance U.S. national security.
Opening statements today in the suppression hearing in the Khadr case lay out how both sides plan to argue the motion, which aims to stop the government from using any confessions by Omar Khadr to any of the crimes alleged.
Among the many striking aspects of the Justice Department's recently-released ethics report on the creation of the "torture memos" are the repeated indications that John Yoo, the memos' principal author, was in frequent direct contact with the White House and under intense pressure to quickly approve abusive interrogation techniques that policymakers had already chosen to implement but knew might amount to torture.
Within Scott Horton's disturbing tale of the three "suicides" that probably weren't, comes confirmation that America's rotten gulag of ill repute has an Area 51 gulag of its very own, meet "Camp No":
The compound was not visible from the main road, and the access road was chained off. The Guardsman who told Davila about the compound had said, "This place does not exist," and Hickman, who was frequently put in charge of security for all of Camp America, was not briefed about the site. Nevertheless, Davila said, other soldiers-many of whom were required to patrol the outside perimeter of Camp America-had seen the compound, and many speculated about its purpose. One theory was that it was being used by some of the non-uniformed government personnel who frequently showed up in the camps and were widely thought to be CIA agents.
A friend of Hickman's had nicknamed the compound "Camp No," the idea being that anyone who asked if it existed would be told, "No, it doesn't." He and Davila made a point of stopping by whenever they had the chance; once, Hickman said, he heard a "series of screams" from within the compound.
See it here, top left. Please tell me this facility at least, could be closed in less than a year without an epic Congressional meltdown of NIMBY cowardice. Hopefully we won't have to find out in another revelation that Camp No itself had a secret room or wing where even more inhuman things were going on too horrible for the regular denizens of Camp No.
The evidence for the necessity to hold Bush administration officials accountable for the use of torture continues to grow. Light is being shed, not only on the acts of torture, but also on the indiscriminate and wantonly careless manner in which detainees were designated as such "high value" that they should be considered appropriate subjects for torture interrogation techniques.
On Tuesday, June 16th, the Washington Post reported (CIA Mistaken on 'High-Value' Detainee, Document Shows) that CIA documents confirm the Bush administration was mistaken about Guantanamo detainee Abu Zubaydah being a high-ranking member of al-Qaeda.
The Post report confirmed what Brent Mickum, one of Abu Zubaydah's lawyers, told a torture accountability forum on May 30th, that "Abu Zubaydah was never even a member of al-Qaeda much less a high-level member." Nevertheless, Zubaydah, a Palestinian, was held at a secret CIA facility after his capture in Pakistan in March 2002 and was subjected 83 times to waterboarding.
Mickum on his client Abu Zubaydah at torture accountability forum May 30th:
Mickum wrote about these mistakes by the Bush administration in a March 30th article "The Truth About Abu Zubaydah" published in the British newspaper Guardian.
The facts surrounding the handling and treatment of Abu Zubaydah that have so far come to light raise enormous doubts about Dick Cheney's assertions that the techniques he authorized were used sparingly, only on "high-value" suspects and yielded positive results. Closer to the truth is that the use of these torture techniques was reckless, in most cases based on implausible and mistaken information, and may involve a cover-up by the OLC.
Torture is neither new nor peripheral to American foreign policy, historian Alfred McCoy reminds us.
In 1972, fledgling historian Alfred McCoy published one of the most shocking exposés of an exposé-filled decade, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, which documented decades of cooperative relationships between the CIA and drug dealers, beginning with deals that allowed the almost-dead heroin trade to revive after WWII, and culminating in the role of the CIA in the drug trade surrounding the Vietnam War, which lead to the addiction of tens of thousands of US troops. The CIA tried-and failed-to have the book suppressed. A revised, updated and expanded version, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade was published in 2003.
One thing, at least, could be said in the CIA's defense: McCoy never claimed that the CIA set out to promote the global drug trade. It was simply a byproduct of how it chose to "fight Communism." But this could not be said about his subsequent investigation into the CIA's role in developing torture techniques, the subject of his 2006 book, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror . The CIA's development of novel torture techniques was intentional, deliberate, and took place over more than a decade at enormous cost, after which its methods were shared with authoritarian allies around the world.
McCoy previewed his findings in a 2004 article for TomDispatch, "The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib", an excerpt of which I'll present on the flip. It's safe to say that no critic has thought harder and studied more intently the hidden role and hidden costs of torture in modern American history.
Last Sunday, TomDispatch published a new article by McCoy, "Confronting the CIA's Mind Maze: America's Political Paralysis Over Torture" that throws a chilling historical light on Obama's ongoing efforts to magically make torture disappear. Real change, of course, would mean putting an end to this nearly 60-year history of US involvement in modern torture. Instead, McCoy explains how Obama is simply preparing us for more of the same sordid history.
Desperately trying to distract attention from the rapidly-breaking, multiple-angle story that BushCo tortured detainees to concoct a phony excuse for the Iraq War, the GOP has decided that the best defense is a good offense, and if that's not available, then just giving offense will have to do.
And so they're going after Nancy Pelosi for sticking by her guns that the CIA never briefed her that it had already used torture. The CIA said they did brief her, Pelosi says not so much. And since the CIA also said they had briefed former Senator Bob Graham four times (including twice shortly after Pelosi) and now they've been forced to back down from that, things aren't really looking so good for the Slam Dunk-era CIA guys, and their current-day ass-coverers.
But you go to war with the lies you've got, as a great liar once said, not the lies you wish you had. Leading the crowd, of course, is the most hyperboliplectic GOP leader/liar of the past 20 years, serial adulterer Newt Gingrich.
In an interview with ABC News Radio's Marcus Wilson, Gingrich, R-Ga., said Pelosi, D-Calif., "has lied to the House" in claiming that she was never briefed by the CIA about the Bush administration's use of waterboarding and other harsh tactics.
"I think she has lied to the House, and I think that the House has an absolute obligation to open an inquiry, and I hope there will be a resolution to investigate her. And I think this is a big deal. I don't think the Speaker of the House can lie to the country on national security matters," Gingrich said.
He's right, of course. That's the President's job!
According to Ali Soufan, an FBI interrogator, waterboarding and other "enhanced interrogation" procedures actually caused a key Al Qaeda operative to clam up, not provide actionable intelligence as former Vice President Dick Cheney and others have claimed.
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