R
Ramabriga
Guest
What is Probably in the Missing Tapes
By Naomi Wolf, Monday, December 13, 2007
To judge from firsthand documents obtained by the ACLU through a FOIA
lawsuit, we can guess what is probably on the missing CIA interrogation
tapes -- as well as understand why those implicated are spinning so hard
to pretend the tapes do not document a series of evident crimes.
According to the little-noticed but extraordinarily important book
Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu
Ghraib and Beyond (Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, Columbia University
Press, New York 2007), which presents dozens of original formerly secret
documents - FBI emails and memos, letters and interrogator "wish lists,"
raw proof of the systemic illegal torture of detainees in various
US-held prisons -- the typical "harsh interrogation" of a suspect in US
custody reads like an account of abuses in archives at Yad Vashem.
More is still being hidden as of this writing -- as those in Congress
now considering whether a special prosecutor is needed in this case
should be urgently aware: "Through the FOIA lawsuit," write the authors,
"we learned of the existence of multiple records relating to prisoner
abuse that still have not been released by the administration; credible
media reports identify others. As this book goes to print, the Bush
administration is still withholding, among many other records, a
September 2001 presidential directive authorizing the CIA to set up
secret detention centers overseas; an August 2002 Justice Department
memorandum advising the CIA about the lawfulness of waterboarding
[Italics mine; nota bene, Mr. Mukasey] and other aggressive
interrogation methods; documents describing interrogation methods used
by special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; investigative
files concerning the deaths of prisoners in U.S. custody; and numerous
photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners at detention facilities
other than Abu Ghraib.'
What we are likely to see if the tapes documenting the interrogation of
Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri are ever recovered is that the
"confessions" of the prisoners upon which the White House has built its
entire case for subverting the Constitution and suspending civil
liberties in this country was obtained through methods such as
electrocution, beating to the point of organ failure, hanging prisoners
from the wrists from a ceiling, suffocation, and threats against family
members ("I am going to find your mother and I am going to **** her" is
one direct quote from a US interrogator). On the missing tapes, we would
likely see responses from the prisoners that would be obvious to us as
confessions to anything at all in order to end the violence. In other
words, if we could witness the drama of manufacturing by torture the
many violently coerced "confessions" upon which the whole house of cards
of this White House and its hyped "war on terror" rests, it would likely
cause us to reopen every investigation, including the most serious ones
(remember, even the 9/11 committee did not receive copies of the tapes);
shut down the corrupt, Stalinesque Military Commissions System; turn
over prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, into a working, accountable
justice system operating in accordance with American values; and direct
our legal scrutiny to the torturers themselves -- right up to the office
of the Vice President and the President if that is where the
investigations would lead.
By the way: "The prohibition against torture [in the law] is considered
to be a jus cogens norm, meaning that no derogation is permitted from it
under any circumstances."
This is what the FOIA documents report, belying White House soundbites
that "we don't torture" and explaining the intent pursuit on the part of
the CIA and the White House of the current apparent obstruction of justice:
Late 2002 -- the FBI objects to the illegality of abuses being put into
place by the Defense Department in its "special interrogation plan" to
use isolation, sleep deprivation and menacing with dogs against prisoners.
Dec 2, 2002 -- Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally issues a directive
authorizing the use of stress positions, hooding, removal of clothing,
and the terrorizing of inmates at Guantanamo with dogs.
Dec 3, 2002 -- at Baghram, interrogators kill an Afghan prisoner "by
shackling him by his wrists to the wire ceiling above his cell and
repeatedly beating his legs. A postmortem report finds abrasions and
contusions on the prisoner's face, head, neck, arms and legs and
determines that the death was a "homicide" caused by "blunt force injuries."
April 16, 2003 -- Rumsfeld approves yet another directive for abusive
interrogation.
This directive for Afghanistan restores to the interrogators' arsenal
many forms of torture that had been resisted by the FBI. [Notably, the
FBI had resisted complying with the direct commission of torture since
as early as 2002 because, as its Behavioral Analysis Unit complained to
the Defense Department at that time in an internal email, "not only are
these tactics at odds with legally permissible interviewing techniques
[italics mine: in other words, all concerned know these are apparent war
crimes]...but they are being employed by personnel in GTMO who have
little, if any, experience eliciting information for judicial purposes."
In other words, as any trained interrogator knows, the abuses are both
doubtless illegal and certainly ineffective for getting real
intelligence. [Jaffer and Singh, Timeline of Key Events, pp. 45-65,op. cit.]
Oct 22 2003 -- Final autopsy report relating to death of "52 y/o Iraqi
Male, Civilian Detainee" held by U.S. forces in Nasiriyah, Iraq.
Prisoner was found to have "died as a result of asphyxia...due to
strangulation."
November 14, 2003 -- a sworn statement of a soldier stationed at Camp
Red, Baghdad, states that "I saw what I think were war crimes" and that
"the chain of command....allowed them to happen."
May 13, 2004 -- a sworn statement of the 302nd Military Intelligence
Battalion recounts an incident in which "interrogators abused
17-year-old son of prisoner in order to 'break' the prisoner."
May 18, 2004 -- a Privacy Act statement of an Abu Ghraib sergeant notes
that prisoners had been forced to stand "naked with a bag over their
head, standing on MRE boxes and their hand spread out...holding a
bottle in each hand."
May 24, 2004 -- Sworn statement of interrogator who arrived at Abu
Ghraib in October 2003, discussing use of military dogs against juvenile
prisoners.
June 16, 2004 -- Marine Corps document describing abuse cases between
September 2001 and June 2004, including "substantiated" incidents in
which marines electrocuted a prisoner and set another's hands on fire.
Undated: Sworn statement of screener who arrived at Abu Ghraib in
September 2003, indicating that prisoners at Asamiya Palace in Baghdad
had been beaten, burned and subjected to electric shocks.
Subsequent internal documents record prisoners being stripped, made to
walk into walls blindfolded, punched, kicked, dragged about the room,
observed to have bruises and burn marks on their backs, and having their
jaws deliberately broken. Still other reports document further incidents
classified by the military itself as probable murders committed by US
interrogators.
The book also reveals an extraordinary original transcript of a Dept. of
the Army Inspector General interview with Lieutenant General Randall
Marc Schmidt. Lt. Gen. Schmidt had interfaced with MG Geoffrey Miller on
the one hand -- the most brutal overseer of such abuses, the one who was
sent to "Gitmo-ize" other prisons -- and the honorable JAG military
lawyers on the other hand, over the abuses under investigation at that
time. [Lt. Gen. Schmidt advised MG Miller of his rights under Article 31
of the Uniform Code of Military Justice at that time -- in other words,
those involved know something serious is at stake, p. a-16].
The transcript of this internal document reveals Lt. Gen. Schmidt's own
words that it was his understanding that the directives to commit these
acts, many of which are apparently war crimes, came right from the top.
The interview was not primarily intended to be a public document:
"An Inspector General" notes the document, "is an impartial fact-finder
for the Directing Authority Testimony taken by an IG and reports based
on that testimony may be used for official purposes. Access is normally
restricted to persons who clearly need the information to perform their
official duties. [italics mine]. In some cases, disclosure to other
persons may be required by law or regulation or may be directed by
proper authority." As in the case, clearly, here -- though the immense
implications of this privately taken testimony have not reverberated
fully yet in a public forum: "I thought the Secretary of Defense in good
faith was approving techniques," testified Lt. Gen. Schmidt. "In good
faith after talking to him twice. I know that -- and these weren't
interrogations or interviews of him. This was our hour and forty-five
minutes and then another hour and fifteen kind of thing were [sic] we
sat in there and had these discussions with him." [Testimony of Lt. Gen.
Randall M Schmidt, Taken 24 August 2005 at Davis Mountain Air Force
Base, Arizona, Dept. of the Army Inspector General, Investigations
Division, pp. a-30 to a-53, Jaffer and Singh, op. cit].
So what should Congress know as it decides what is to be done?
We torture, illegally, by directive; the directives come from the top;
those who torture know it is probably criminal; when we torture
prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, they will tell us anything they
think we want to hear -- including implicate themselves falsely, as many
reports from Human Rights Watch and other rights organizations testify
to -- to make the torture stop; and the White House routinely uses that
faked or coerced unverifiable "intelligence" to buttress its wholesale
assault on our liberties.
As the CIA tries to spin its apparent crimes and claim that its
waterboarding and other forms of criminal torture "saved lives" -- while
conveniently offering no evidence to back that up, and while the
administration withholds evidence to the contrary from the lawyers of
the detainees -- we should bear in mind that the decades of research on
torture summarized in the magisterial survey "The Question of Torture"
show beyond the shadow of a doubt that prisoners being tortured will
indeed "say anything." When American prisoners were tortured by the
North Vietnamese, their confessions were phrased in Communist cliches.
We should note too -- as the White House tries to muddy the waters by
pretending that there has ever been a "debate" about such acts as these
-- that the US in the past prosecuted waterboarding itself: when the
Japanese had waterboarded US prisoners they were convicted with
sentences of fifteen years of hard labor.
We should also bear in mind that the Bush White House has deliberately
crafted its memos and laws -- such as the Bybee/Gonzales "torture memo"
and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- with a keen eye to seeking
indemnification of its own guilt regarding having committed evident
crimes, because those involved know quite well that acts committed could
be criminal acts. (An historical note worth mentioning, when we consider
how hyperalert the Bush White House has been to the issue of seeking
retroactively to protect itself and its subordinates from prosecution
for war and other crimes, is that the Nuremberg Trials eventually swept
up influential Nazi industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen of IG Farben --
who relied on Auschwitz slave labor -- and with whom Prescott Bush had
collaborated in amassing the Bush family millions; some of the sentences
given to those industrialists found guilty in the postwar trials were
severe.) For a moment postwar, the legal spotlight was also about to
search out and hold accountable the several prominent US investors who
had partnered with Nazi industrialists (see the exhaustively documented
study of US/Nazi corporate collaboration, IBM and the Holocaust.)
Prosecution for war crimes and other criminal acts, which the
administration so clearly recognizes that it may well have committed --
which its legislation so clearly shows it realized it may well commit in
advance of the commission -- is the only consequence the Bush team seems
to be really afraid of as it attempts its multiple subversions of the
rule of law. This is why the nation's grassroots call for a truly
independent investigation into possible criminality is so very urgent
and so necessary to restore the rule of law in our nation.
Mr. Mukasey could look up his own department's files and understand that
waterboarding is a war crime; not only that, the US Military prosecuted
waterboarding as a war crime itself in 1902 -- it had been used against
prisoners in the Phillipines -- and those Americans who had committed it
received convictions from the military. It is hopeless to rely on the
Justice Department.
An independent special prosecutor must be appointed. The people who are
found guilty, in America, must face justice.
Let the investigations begin.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com
By Naomi Wolf, Monday, December 13, 2007
To judge from firsthand documents obtained by the ACLU through a FOIA
lawsuit, we can guess what is probably on the missing CIA interrogation
tapes -- as well as understand why those implicated are spinning so hard
to pretend the tapes do not document a series of evident crimes.
According to the little-noticed but extraordinarily important book
Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu
Ghraib and Beyond (Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, Columbia University
Press, New York 2007), which presents dozens of original formerly secret
documents - FBI emails and memos, letters and interrogator "wish lists,"
raw proof of the systemic illegal torture of detainees in various
US-held prisons -- the typical "harsh interrogation" of a suspect in US
custody reads like an account of abuses in archives at Yad Vashem.
More is still being hidden as of this writing -- as those in Congress
now considering whether a special prosecutor is needed in this case
should be urgently aware: "Through the FOIA lawsuit," write the authors,
"we learned of the existence of multiple records relating to prisoner
abuse that still have not been released by the administration; credible
media reports identify others. As this book goes to print, the Bush
administration is still withholding, among many other records, a
September 2001 presidential directive authorizing the CIA to set up
secret detention centers overseas; an August 2002 Justice Department
memorandum advising the CIA about the lawfulness of waterboarding
[Italics mine; nota bene, Mr. Mukasey] and other aggressive
interrogation methods; documents describing interrogation methods used
by special operations forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; investigative
files concerning the deaths of prisoners in U.S. custody; and numerous
photographs depicting the abuse of prisoners at detention facilities
other than Abu Ghraib.'
What we are likely to see if the tapes documenting the interrogation of
Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri are ever recovered is that the
"confessions" of the prisoners upon which the White House has built its
entire case for subverting the Constitution and suspending civil
liberties in this country was obtained through methods such as
electrocution, beating to the point of organ failure, hanging prisoners
from the wrists from a ceiling, suffocation, and threats against family
members ("I am going to find your mother and I am going to **** her" is
one direct quote from a US interrogator). On the missing tapes, we would
likely see responses from the prisoners that would be obvious to us as
confessions to anything at all in order to end the violence. In other
words, if we could witness the drama of manufacturing by torture the
many violently coerced "confessions" upon which the whole house of cards
of this White House and its hyped "war on terror" rests, it would likely
cause us to reopen every investigation, including the most serious ones
(remember, even the 9/11 committee did not receive copies of the tapes);
shut down the corrupt, Stalinesque Military Commissions System; turn
over prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, into a working, accountable
justice system operating in accordance with American values; and direct
our legal scrutiny to the torturers themselves -- right up to the office
of the Vice President and the President if that is where the
investigations would lead.
By the way: "The prohibition against torture [in the law] is considered
to be a jus cogens norm, meaning that no derogation is permitted from it
under any circumstances."
This is what the FOIA documents report, belying White House soundbites
that "we don't torture" and explaining the intent pursuit on the part of
the CIA and the White House of the current apparent obstruction of justice:
Late 2002 -- the FBI objects to the illegality of abuses being put into
place by the Defense Department in its "special interrogation plan" to
use isolation, sleep deprivation and menacing with dogs against prisoners.
Dec 2, 2002 -- Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally issues a directive
authorizing the use of stress positions, hooding, removal of clothing,
and the terrorizing of inmates at Guantanamo with dogs.
Dec 3, 2002 -- at Baghram, interrogators kill an Afghan prisoner "by
shackling him by his wrists to the wire ceiling above his cell and
repeatedly beating his legs. A postmortem report finds abrasions and
contusions on the prisoner's face, head, neck, arms and legs and
determines that the death was a "homicide" caused by "blunt force injuries."
April 16, 2003 -- Rumsfeld approves yet another directive for abusive
interrogation.
This directive for Afghanistan restores to the interrogators' arsenal
many forms of torture that had been resisted by the FBI. [Notably, the
FBI had resisted complying with the direct commission of torture since
as early as 2002 because, as its Behavioral Analysis Unit complained to
the Defense Department at that time in an internal email, "not only are
these tactics at odds with legally permissible interviewing techniques
[italics mine: in other words, all concerned know these are apparent war
crimes]...but they are being employed by personnel in GTMO who have
little, if any, experience eliciting information for judicial purposes."
In other words, as any trained interrogator knows, the abuses are both
doubtless illegal and certainly ineffective for getting real
intelligence. [Jaffer and Singh, Timeline of Key Events, pp. 45-65,op. cit.]
Oct 22 2003 -- Final autopsy report relating to death of "52 y/o Iraqi
Male, Civilian Detainee" held by U.S. forces in Nasiriyah, Iraq.
Prisoner was found to have "died as a result of asphyxia...due to
strangulation."
November 14, 2003 -- a sworn statement of a soldier stationed at Camp
Red, Baghdad, states that "I saw what I think were war crimes" and that
"the chain of command....allowed them to happen."
May 13, 2004 -- a sworn statement of the 302nd Military Intelligence
Battalion recounts an incident in which "interrogators abused
17-year-old son of prisoner in order to 'break' the prisoner."
May 18, 2004 -- a Privacy Act statement of an Abu Ghraib sergeant notes
that prisoners had been forced to stand "naked with a bag over their
head, standing on MRE boxes and their hand
bottle in each hand."
May 24, 2004 -- Sworn statement of interrogator who arrived at Abu
Ghraib in October 2003, discussing use of military dogs against juvenile
prisoners.
June 16, 2004 -- Marine Corps document describing abuse cases between
September 2001 and June 2004, including "substantiated" incidents in
which marines electrocuted a prisoner and set another's hands on fire.
Undated: Sworn statement of screener who arrived at Abu Ghraib in
September 2003, indicating that prisoners at Asamiya Palace in Baghdad
had been beaten, burned and subjected to electric shocks.
Subsequent internal documents record prisoners being stripped, made to
walk into walls blindfolded, punched, kicked, dragged about the room,
observed to have bruises and burn marks on their backs, and having their
jaws deliberately broken. Still other reports document further incidents
classified by the military itself as probable murders committed by US
interrogators.
The book also reveals an extraordinary original transcript of a Dept. of
the Army Inspector General interview with Lieutenant General Randall
Marc Schmidt. Lt. Gen. Schmidt had interfaced with MG Geoffrey Miller on
the one hand -- the most brutal overseer of such abuses, the one who was
sent to "Gitmo-ize" other prisons -- and the honorable JAG military
lawyers on the other hand, over the abuses under investigation at that
time. [Lt. Gen. Schmidt advised MG Miller of his rights under Article 31
of the Uniform Code of Military Justice at that time -- in other words,
those involved know something serious is at stake, p. a-16].
The transcript of this internal document reveals Lt. Gen. Schmidt's own
words that it was his understanding that the directives to commit these
acts, many of which are apparently war crimes, came right from the top.
The interview was not primarily intended to be a public document:
"An Inspector General" notes the document, "is an impartial fact-finder
for the Directing Authority Testimony taken by an IG and reports based
on that testimony may be used for official purposes. Access is normally
restricted to persons who clearly need the information to perform their
official duties. [italics mine]. In some cases, disclosure to other
persons may be required by law or regulation or may be directed by
proper authority." As in the case, clearly, here -- though the immense
implications of this privately taken testimony have not reverberated
fully yet in a public forum: "I thought the Secretary of Defense in good
faith was approving techniques," testified Lt. Gen. Schmidt. "In good
faith after talking to him twice. I know that -- and these weren't
interrogations or interviews of him. This was our hour and forty-five
minutes and then another hour and fifteen kind of thing were [sic] we
sat in there and had these discussions with him." [Testimony of Lt. Gen.
Randall M Schmidt, Taken 24 August 2005 at Davis Mountain Air Force
Base, Arizona, Dept. of the Army Inspector General, Investigations
Division, pp. a-30 to a-53, Jaffer and Singh, op. cit].
So what should Congress know as it decides what is to be done?
We torture, illegally, by directive; the directives come from the top;
those who torture know it is probably criminal; when we torture
prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, they will tell us anything they
think we want to hear -- including implicate themselves falsely, as many
reports from Human Rights Watch and other rights organizations testify
to -- to make the torture stop; and the White House routinely uses that
faked or coerced unverifiable "intelligence" to buttress its wholesale
assault on our liberties.
As the CIA tries to spin its apparent crimes and claim that its
waterboarding and other forms of criminal torture "saved lives" -- while
conveniently offering no evidence to back that up, and while the
administration withholds evidence to the contrary from the lawyers of
the detainees -- we should bear in mind that the decades of research on
torture summarized in the magisterial survey "The Question of Torture"
show beyond the shadow of a doubt that prisoners being tortured will
indeed "say anything." When American prisoners were tortured by the
North Vietnamese, their confessions were phrased in Communist cliches.
We should note too -- as the White House tries to muddy the waters by
pretending that there has ever been a "debate" about such acts as these
-- that the US in the past prosecuted waterboarding itself: when the
Japanese had waterboarded US prisoners they were convicted with
sentences of fifteen years of hard labor.
We should also bear in mind that the Bush White House has deliberately
crafted its memos and laws -- such as the Bybee/Gonzales "torture memo"
and the Military Commissions Act of 2006 -- with a keen eye to seeking
indemnification of its own guilt regarding having committed evident
crimes, because those involved know quite well that acts committed could
be criminal acts. (An historical note worth mentioning, when we consider
how hyperalert the Bush White House has been to the issue of seeking
retroactively to protect itself and its subordinates from prosecution
for war and other crimes, is that the Nuremberg Trials eventually swept
up influential Nazi industrialists such as Fritz Thyssen of IG Farben --
who relied on Auschwitz slave labor -- and with whom Prescott Bush had
collaborated in amassing the Bush family millions; some of the sentences
given to those industrialists found guilty in the postwar trials were
severe.) For a moment postwar, the legal spotlight was also about to
search out and hold accountable the several prominent US investors who
had partnered with Nazi industrialists (see the exhaustively documented
study of US/Nazi corporate collaboration, IBM and the Holocaust.)
Prosecution for war crimes and other criminal acts, which the
administration so clearly recognizes that it may well have committed --
which its legislation so clearly shows it realized it may well commit in
advance of the commission -- is the only consequence the Bush team seems
to be really afraid of as it attempts its multiple subversions of the
rule of law. This is why the nation's grassroots call for a truly
independent investigation into possible criminality is so very urgent
and so necessary to restore the rule of law in our nation.
Mr. Mukasey could look up his own department's files and understand that
waterboarding is a war crime; not only that, the US Military prosecuted
waterboarding as a war crime itself in 1902 -- it had been used against
prisoners in the Phillipines -- and those Americans who had committed it
received convictions from the military. It is hopeless to rely on the
Justice Department.
An independent special prosecutor must be appointed. The people who are
found guilty, in America, must face justice.
Let the investigations begin.
--
Posted via a free Usenet account from http://www.teranews.com