Best Reporting on Detention & Rendition Under Obama

The Best Reporting on Detention and Rendition Under Obama

http://www.propublica.org/article/the-best-reporting-on-detention-and-rendition-under-obama

When Barack Obama took office, he banned torture, shut down the CIA's network of black-site prisons and pledged to close Guantanamo. But exactly where terror suspects should go continues to be a legal and political challenge for the administration. So we've rounded up some of the best reporting on rendition and detention under Obama. Got others? Add them in the comments.

Why Obama Hasn't Closed Guantanamo Camps, Foreign Affairs, January 2012
Miami Herald's Guantanamo reporter Carol Rosenberg analyzes the combination of political, security and bureaucratic obstacles that have thwarted Obama's plans to shut down the prison. ProPublica has also covered the dilemma of indefinite detention at Guantanamo.

Terror Suspect Secretly Held for Two Months, Los Angeles Times, July 2011
Ahmed Warsame was the first known terror suspect to be held by the Obama administration outside the legal system, on a Navy ship. Administration officials said Warsame was interrogated "humanely" and not by the CIA. Wired's Danger Roomconfirmed the ship where Warsame was held, calling it the administration's floating alternative to Guantanamo.

Iraq and Afghanistan

Secret Prison Revealed in Baghdad, Los Angeles Times, April 2010
In a secret prison in Baghdad, hundreds of Sunnis were allegedly held and tortured under the jurisdiction of Iraqi prime minister Nouri Maliki's military office. About a year later, a second secret prison was uncovered in the Green Zone, raising concerns about human rights abuses as the U.S. diminishes its role in Iraq.

U.S. Had Advance Warning of Abuse at Afghan Prisons, Officials Say, Washington Post, October 2011
Were CIA officials aware of torture inside Afghan prisons prior to a United Nations investigation? This piece explores whether U.S. officials failed to act on early evidence of detainee abuse at facilities run by an Afghan intelligence force funded by the U.S.

2 Afghans Allege Abuse at U.S. Site, Washington Post, and Afghans Detail Detention in 'Black Jail' at U.S. Base, New York Times, November 2009
Some of the first revelations about U.S. Joint Special Operations Command secret jail at Bagram Air Force Base emerged from these interviews with Afghans who said they had been held for months, and in some cases beaten. A few months later, the Red Cross confirmed the site to the BBC, but the U.S. continued to deny its existence.

Afghanistan Secret Prisons Confirmed by U.S., The Associated Press, April 2011
The Pentagon confirms a network of secret "temporary" detention centers in Afghanistan, but former detainees claim they were held weeks at a time. The AP also reports new details about JSOC's secret jail at Bagram, where, according to human rights groups, detainees were forced to strip naked and kept in solitary confinement in windowless cells.

Detainees Are Handed Over to Afghans, but Not Out of Americans' Reach, New York Times, May 2012
As detainees are transferred from Bagram to new, nominally Afghan-controlled prisons, Americans still have de facto control over their fate, as "no detainee can be released unless the Afghans consult with the Americans and consider their views favorably."

Reports of Proxy Detention, Mother Jones, the Nation, and the New York Times
Several individuals who were detained overseas and held by local security forces under harsh conditions allege U.S. officials were complicit in their arrests. This April, Mother Jones wrote about a Muslim American man who claims he was interrogated and! beaten by local police in the United Arab Emirates. He claims the questions were "eerily similar" to those asked by American officials when he was earlier interrogated in Sudan. In March 2010, The Nation chronicled the experience of a Lebanese man and naturalized U.S. citizen questioned by U.A.E. officials in the suspected presence of an American interrogator. In January 2011, the New York Times reported on a Somali-American teenager who claims he was held in a Kuwaiti detention cell and interrog! ated about contacts with terrorist suspects in Yemen. He said he was visited by American officials while in detention. In each case, the U.S. has declined comment.

The CIA's Secret Sites in Somalia, The Nation, July 2011
This report describes a secret CIA counterterrorism training facility and an underground prison in Mogadishu. While the prison is run by the Somali National Security Agency, former prisoners and Somali officials say the CIA regularly conducts interrogations there and keeps local intelligence workers on the payroll.

Somalia's Prisons: the War on Terror's Latest Front, Daily Beast, June 2012
The U.S. acknowledged it has a military presence in Somalia just last month. The warden at an overcrowded Somali prison says the Americans have sent him sixteen prisoners since 2009. A Pentagon spokesman says only that the U.S. has handed prisoners "back over to where they came from."

The Drugging of Detainees for Interrogation

Summary - EXCLUSIVE: Department of Defense Declassifies Report on Alleged Drugging of Detainees by Jeffrey Kaye & Jason Leopold at Truthout.org Wed., July 11, 2012

1. Detainees in custody of the US military were interrogated while drugged with powerful antipsychotic and other medications that "could impair an individual's ability to provide accurate information." I would add that for those detainees in current habeas proceedings, the burden lies on them to prove that their statements made under the influence of drugs were not accurate.

2. Some detainees were subjected to "chemical restraints." DoD also admits to use of forced injections on some detainees, ostensibly for mental health purposes.

3.  In what the Inspector General called a "deliberate ruse" by interrogators, Jose Padilla was the subject of a "deliberate ruse" in which his interrogator led him to believe he was given an injection of "truth serum." Other detainees and DoD made similar charges.

4. The Behavioral Science Consultation Teams, which aided interrogators at Guantanamo and other DoD sites, kept a separate "restricted" medical database on detainees. These records were not referenced in the IG investigation.


5. DoD says it cannot substantiate any of the allegations by current and former detainees that, as a matter of government policy, they were given mind-altering drugs "to facilitate interrogation." However, the IG only interviewed two detainees, and none of the released detainees who have claimed to have been drugged.

6. A former Guantanamo guard reports, ""The medics walked around with little white cups that had pills in it a couple of times a day," and if detainees would not take the medications, Immediate Reaction Force teams would administer the drugs by force.

7. The former Interrogation Control Element (ICE) Chief at Guantanamo proposed to Donald Rumsfeld's Working Group on interrogations that "truth drugs" be used on detainees for their "effectiveness," having heard rumors another government agency was already using them.

Cruel and Unusual - Jimmy Carter

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June 24, 2012   http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/25/opinion/americas-shameful-human-rights-record.html?_r=1&src=rechp

A Cruel and Unusual Record

By JIMMY CARTER

Atlanta

THE United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.

While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past. With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.

The declaration has been invoked by human rights activists and the international community to replace most of the world’s dictatorships with democracies and to promote the rule of law in domestic and global affairs. It is disturbing that, instead of strengthening these principles, our government’s counterterrorism policies are now clearly violating at least 10 of the declaration’s 30 articles, including the prohibition against “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Recent legislation has made legal the president’s right to detain a person indefinitely on suspicion of affiliation with terrorist organizations or “associated forces,” a broad, vague power that can be abused without meaningful oversight from the courts or Congress (the law is currently being blocked by a federal judge). This law violates the right to freedom of expression and to be presumed innocent until proved guilty, two other rights enshrined in the declaration.

In addition to American citizens’ being targeted for assassination or indefinite detention, recent laws have canceled the restraints in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to allow unprecedented violations of our rights to privacy through warrantless wiretapping and government mining of our electronic communications. Popular state laws permit detaining individuals because of their appearance, where they worship or with whom they associate.

Despite an arbitrary rule that any man killed by drones is declared an enemy terrorist, the death of nearby innocent women and children is accepted as inevitable. After more than 30 airstrikes on civilian homes this year in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has demanded that such attacks end, but the practice continues in areas of Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen that are not in any war zone. We don’t know how many hundreds of innocent civilians have been killed in these attacks, each one approved by the highest authorities in Washington. This would have been unthinkable in previous times.

These policies clearly affect American foreign policy. Top intelligence and military officials, as well as rights defenders in targeted areas, affirm that the great escalation in drone attacks has turned aggrieved families toward terrorist organizations, aroused civilian populations against us and permitted repressive governments to cite such actions to justify their own despotic behavior.

Meanwhile, the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, now houses 169 prisoners. About half have been cleared for release, yet have little prospect of ever obtaining their freedom. American authorities have revealed that, in order to obtain confessions, some of the few being tried (only in military courts) have been tortured by waterboarding more than 100 times or intimidated with semiautomatic weapons, power drills or threats to sexually assault their mothers. Astoundingly, these facts cannot be used as a defense by the accused, because the government claims they occurred under the cover of “national security.” Most of the other prisoners have no prospect of ever being charged or tried either.

At a time when popular revolutions are sweeping the globe, the United States should be strengthening, not weakening, basic rules of law and principles of justice enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But instead of making the world safer, America’s violation of international human rights abets our enemies and alienates our friends.

As concerned citizens, we must persuade Washington to reverse course and regain moral leadership according to international human rights norms that we had officially adopted as our own and cherished throughout the years.

Jimmy Carter, the 39th president, is the founder of the Carter Center and the recipient of the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

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Jose Rodriguez, Poster Boy - Scott Horton

Jose Rodriguez, Poster Boy –

Scott Horton May 1, 2012 M    http://harpers.org/subjects/NoComment

 Why did Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, destroy ninety-two tapes of interrogation sessions in which terrorism suspects were subjected to waterboarding and other torture techniques? On Sunday, Lesley Stahl put the question to him on 60 Minutes, and he provided an answer:

rodriguez: To protect the people who worked for me and who were at those black sites and whose faces were shown on the tape.

stahl: Protect them from what?

rodriguez: Protect them from Al Qaeda ever getting their hands on these tapes and using them to go after them and their families.

Rodriguez’s claims don’t stand up. Tapes are released with some regularity by the government, and when they are, the identities of any Americans shown in them are almost always obscured—in fact, U.S. law would generally require that this be so. So his first concern hardly makes sense. His second, that the interrogators would become Al Qaeda targets, is similarly a stretch, not only because their identities would not be disclosed, but because of the clear success of the U.S. campaign against Al Qaeda. The terrorist organization has been decimated; it is now struggling from the margins against extinction. And even if it were in a position to strike, low- or mid-level CIA interrogators would hardly be high on its list of targets.

So why did Rodriguez really send those ninety-two tapes through an industrial-strength shredder? We know that they contained information sought under court order for use in civil and criminal litigations. Their release would probably have resolved questions about whether certain prisoners had been tortured, and about the circumstances under which the prisoners made certain statements. Disclosure would also have resolved questions about which techniques the CIA used and how they were applied. These are hardly abstract concerns—even today, former attorney general Michael Mukasey regularly explains to incredulous audiences that when America waterboards, it is entirely different than the waterboarding of the Nazis, the Khmer Rouge, and the Spanish Inquisition. Such claims might not be so easy to repeat if we could actually witness what the United States had done. Clearly Rodriguez didn’t want these details to come out.

Rodriguez told 60 Minutes that he thought destroying the tapes was legal. We can dismiss that possibility, too. We only have to think back to the Enron–Arthur Andersen affair of 2001 to 2003 to know how the American criminal-justice system usually deals with persons who consciously destroy evidence sought in pending cases and investigations: criminal convictions, followed, in Enron’s case, by prosecutions and the closure of a century-old global firm with 85,000 employees. These events were still fresh in 2004 and 2005, when Rodriguez was fretting over the destruction of the tapes. He would plainly have understood that he could be prosecuted and sent to jail for destroying them. Indeed, why has Rodriguez not been charged and put on trial?

That’s a question many are asking as he takes to the airwaves to push the idea that torture works. The only satisfactory answer lies in the doctrine of in pari delicto1 1.

In pari delicto applies when both sides of a lawsuit have been involved in the same wrongdoing. —the Justice Department is itself so deeply enmeshed in Rodriguez’s crimes that it could hardly prosecute the case. But if this doctrine explains the DOJ’s failure to prosecute, it also suggests that someone else should be bringing the charges.

Former FBI agent Ali Soufan, receiving the Ridenhour Prize last Wednesday for his book The Black Banners, took direct aim at Rodriguez in his acceptance speech. The tapes were destroyed, he said, because they provided “evidence of [the CIA’s] unprofessionalism, and incompetence.” By destroying the tapes, Rodriguez gave himself room to fictionalize what happened during those interrogations sessions. He seems now to be using this license liberally—and he’s being challenged by those familiar with the CIA’s classified records. Dianne Feinstein, the chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, which is completing a three-year study of the efficacy of the CIA techniques, just issued a press release questioning Rodriguez’s truthfulness and suggesting that he was claiming credit for the accomplishments of others. The Committee’s report, when it is issued, will likely furnish much more detail on the techniques the CIA used and what these techniques produced. From the descriptions we’ve heard so far, it appears as though the report will sharply contradict Rodriguez.

The ninety-two tapes contained compelling evidence of criminality. They presented a dire threat to Rodriguez and those of his masters who approved the use of torture. His motivations in shredding them therefore seem clear enough: he was afraid of criminal prosecution. And he still should be.

There is no immediate threat that charges will be brought against Rodriguez and his bosses—not under Barack Obama and Eric Holder. But Rodriguez has plenty of reason to be concerned that such charges will be pressed against him outside of the United States, and eventually here as well. Rodriguez is a thirty-year veteran of the CIA who spent virtually his entire career in Latin America, serving in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, and other locations. He happily embraces the dark side; indeed, Latin America was home to some of the blackest of CIA black ops, including assassinations and operational support for regimes that routinely used torture. But he would also have observed what happened to many of the CIA’s allies who turned to torture—to generals and admirals who fought the “dirty war” in Argentina and Uruguay, to Pinochet loyalists in Chile, and to Alberto Fujimori in Peru. Each of these regimes left office armored with amnesties and immunities, with official decisions to decline prosecution, and, significantly, with strong public support for the use of torture as a necessary evil in the battle against terrorists. But in the past few years, former heads of state and leading figures in the intelligence communities of each of these countries have been charged, tried, and convicted of crimes that include torture and conspiring to torture.

What happened? Across more than two decades, public opinion steadily turned against those who had used torture. This process was driven by disclosures of photographs and tapes of heinous acts, by the meticulous work of forensic pathologists who gave the victims a voice, by survivors who forcefully recounted their experiences, by journalists who published exposés, and by lawyers who pressed for information to be revealed and who painstakingly assembled facts for lawsuits.

Jose Rodriguez watched all of this happen. He would certainly appreciate the power of these historical precedents and the likelihood that the ninety-two tapes, if released, would come back to haunt him, and quite possibly send him to jail. That, I believe, is why he destroyed them.

During the American campaign against Al Qaeda, FBI agents working with the CIA on the interrogation of a few key suspects began to refer to CIA torture technicians as “the poster boys,” because they expected that the torturers would soon be featured on wanted posters around the world. Jose Rodriguez has earned his place as one of the boys.