The Pentagon Papers of the CIA Torture Program

[seemslikeadream]

Senate Intelligence Committee Takes Up "the Pentagon Papers of the CIA Torture Program" Behind Closed Doors: Report Remains Under Wraps
Thursday, 13 December 2012 13:52
By Jason Leopold, Truthout | Report

Today, as a Senate panel prepares to vote on a voluminous secret report, a lawyer for the most high-profile resident of Gitmo sheds light on what it may contain.
On a cold day in February 2009, Brent Mickum arrived at the Secure Confidential Intelligence Facility in Washington, DC and went into a room that houses two large safes: One holds materials the government has deemed "secret;" the other contains secrets more secret than that.
The lawyer turned the combination on the top-secret safe and pulled from one of four drawers about a dozen drawings - art that is said to document the art of torture.
Mickum brought his secrets into a room where staff members on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence were preparing to launch an investigation into the CIA's torture program. He took his seat at a horseshoe-shaped table and prepared to answer their questions about his notorious client and the meaning of his art.
Today, nearly four years later, the Senate Intelligence Committee will meet in closed session and vote on a classified report, the product of its investigation into whether so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" were effective and produced actionable results, and if they went beyond what the Department of Justice had authorized.
One Intelligence Committee staff member told Truthout the resulting document could be characterized as "the Pentagon Papers of the CIA torture program." But the report will remain secret and it's unclear if a declassified version ever will be released.
The CIA would not comment on the committee's report or the vote taking place later today. However, Mickum's story may shed some light on what a small portion of the report reveals.
The Washington, DC lawyer represents Zayn al-Abidin Muhammad Husayn, better known as Abu Zubaydah - a Guantanamo detainee the US government has claimed for more than a decade to be "one of the highest-ranking members of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization" and "involved in every major terrorist operation carried out by al-Qaeda," including the 9/11 attacks.
Nonetheless, in an extraordinary court filing in March 2010, the Obama administration's Justice Department quietly recanted virtually every major claim leveled by the Bush administration against Zubaydah.
The high-value detainee, who has been held at Guantanamo since 2006, plays a starring role in the nearly 6,000-page torture program report, according to several Senate Intelligence Committee staff members, who asked Truthout not to reveal their identities because of the sensitivity surrounding the issues it addresses.
Zubaydah has the dubious distinction of being the first post-9/11 prisoner subjected to the drowning technique known as waterboarding, as well as a dozen or so other extreme methods of torture.
The infamous "torture memo," drafted in August 2002 by then-Justice Department attorney John Yoo, was created specifically to authorize the CIA to torture Zubaydah, whom CIA contractors and officers had claimed was holding back critical intelligence about pending attack plans. Zubaydah's interrogation sessions, including several that depicted his waterboarding, were videotaped and later destroyed, sparking a criminal investigation conducted by a special prosecutor that ended without any charges being filed.
Zubaydah, who has been held in a section of Guantanamo reserved for detainees formerly in the custody of the CIA, drew pictures of the torture techniques he says he endured and Mickum said the alleged terrorist is a "pretty good artist."
Mickum, who has represented Zubaydah since 2008, told Truthout this week that in lieu of the torture tapes, the drawings Zubaydah made - some on smaller pieces of paper - contain the best-known description of the torture techniques CIA interrogators used against Zubaydah.
Although he was unable to describe the drawings due to the classified nature of the materials, Mickum, who holds a top-secret clearance, said the drawings "show oxygen deprivation can happen in different ways."
Truthout filed what is known as a mandatory declassification review for Zubaydah's drawings, as well as for poetry and short stories the prisoner wrote last year. But the CIA issued a Glomar response to the request - meaning the agency would not confirm or deny their existence.
If Zubaydah's drawings and writings do exist, the CIA said, they would be part of the agency's "operational files," which means "records and files detailing the actual conduct of [CIA's] intelligence activities."
According to Mickum, they not only exist, he presented them to Intelligence Committee staff members on that cold February day. And he told them what they represented.
He noted that some of them were not just of Zubaydah, but of two other prisoners who also apparently were tortured.
Mickum said Zubaydah made a mental note of the stories he was told by other prisoners about their torture and drew a picture of it.
"All of the drawings depict what I would characterize as torture," Mickum told Truthout, recounting what he had told the Intelligence Committee staffers. "That's why [Zubaydah] did them. I think he was just trying to create a record. He wanted me to preserve them as a historical record."
The staff members' reaction was not what Mickum expected.
"I didn't get the impression at all that they were shocked by any of this," he said. "If you were to show this to people, given how good the drawings are, you would expect someone to put a hand to their mouth. That led me to conclude they were aware of this and had probably been briefed on it. I would have thought they would have said, 'Wow! How can you be sure of the dimensions?' There was none of that."
The conversation was driven by Democratic staffers who asked Mickum numerous questions about torture techniques and the difference between "guesthouses" and "safehouses," When Zubaydah was captured on March 28, 2002 in a raid jointly conducted by Pakistani intelligence and the CIA, he had been hiding out in a "safehouse." He also operated a number of "guesthouses" in Pakistan, which Mickum said are like hostels.
There were instances where the two-hour presentation became heated. That, he said, was due to the substance of questions posed to Mickum by Republican staffers. Mickum recalls an aide to Sen. Orin Hatch (R-Utah) was asking Mickum questions he believes was an attempt to get him to "incriminate" Zubaydah.
"He wanted me to provide them with evidence against my client," Mickum said. "The whole point is, he is supposed to be innocent until proven guilty. I let him and the other Republican staffers who asked me similar questions know in no uncertain terms I would not do that. Whatever their [Republican staffers] agenda was, it had nothing to do with listening to what I had to say. They either didn't believe the content of the drawings and what I was telling them was true, or they had a wholly different agenda and didn't view that treatment my client endured as bad, even if it was true."
Before the meeting ended, Mickum said he gave the staffers copies of the drawings and other classified materials. No one on the committee contacted Mickum again.
Weeks later, the panel formally announced that it was undertaking a bipartisan investigation into the CIA's detention and interrogation program.
"The purpose is to review the program and to shape detention and interrogation policies in the future," committee chairwoman Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California) and Vice Chairman Sen. Christopher "Kit" Bond (R-Missouri) said in a statement.
Apparently, the committee has no intention of using any of the information it has collected - regardless of whether laws were broken - to urge the Justice Department to launch a criminal investigation.
Leon Panetta, who at the time was CIA Director, said at the time that Feinstein and Bond "have assured me that their goal is to draw lessons for future policy decisions, not to punish those who followed guidance from the Department of Justice. That is only fair."
Still, Feinstein issued a Senate floor statement last December saying the review had concluded "that coercive and abusive treatment of detainees in US custody was far more systematic and widespread than we thought."
Moreover, she added, "The abuse stemmed not from the isolated acts of a few bad apples, but from fact that the line was blurred between what is permissible and impermissible conduct, putting US personnel in an untenable position with their superiors and the law."
But Feinstein's hopes for a bipartisan review of the program suffered a blow in September 2009, when Sen. Bond, who would retire from the Senate the following year, announced that Republicans would drop out of the inquiry.
He made that decision after Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he had expanded the mandate of the special prosecutor who had been investigating whether laws were broken in connection with the torture tapes to include a "review" of detainees who were tortured by CIA officers. That "review" ended earlier this year without any charges being filed against individual CIA officers.
An intelligence committee staffer said despite Republicans' refusal to participate, a "tremendous amount of resources" went into the torture report the panel is discussing today.
"We looked at millions of pages of correspondence, cables and documents. There's a lot of new information and it will show the program was more widespread than what the public had been told."
Brian Weiss, a spokesman for Feinstein, said the committee reviewed 6 million pages of documents. Weiss would not comment on any discussions the committee had with Mickum, or whether information he provided was used in the drafting of the report.
Despite the secrecy that continues to surround the public controversy over torture, and the likelihood that the report may never be released or anyone held accountable for any adverse findings, the fact that it exists at all is significant, said Devon Chaffee, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
"The Senate Intelligence Committee investigation serves the important purpose of thoroughly documenting the extent and impact of the abusive CIA interrogation and detention program and will hopefully be a crucial tool in ensuring that the United States never returns to the use of torture and other cruelty," said Chaffee, who added that the ACLU provided committee staffers with some of the documents and its analysis of those materials related to the treatment of detainees in custody of the US government the organization obtained over the past decade under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA).
"While the ACLU has uncovered many details about how the CIA torture program was authorized and executed through its [FOIA] litigation, many significant pieces of the puzzle remain shrouded in secrecy," Chaffee said. "No investigative report can take the place of criminal accountability for perpetrators of torture, or remedy for torture victims. But it continues to be incredibly important that the American public know the full extent of the torture and abuse that was perpetrated against prisoners in US custody and the impact that such abuse had on US international standing and national security. That is why it is important that the Senate investigation be made public with only those necessary redactions to protect legitimate secrets."
Retired Brig. Gen. David Irvine, a former interrogator, said during a media call Tuesday coordinated by Human Rights First, that the only reason to keep the report classified is to "prevent the American public from learning what was done in their name."
"You keep material classified to protect sources and methods," said Irvine, who opposes the use of torture. "Many of these records [the Intelligence Committee reviewed] are ten years old. There is no question who the source of this information is. And the methods used were coercive. It's not a secret anymore."
Mickum, however, is disappointed that in the absence of accountability all that will come from the Intelligence Committee's probe is "clarification for the record."
He said if the Intelligence Committee's investigation found that the torture program was in fact far more systematic and widespread, as Feinstein noted, it calls into question the integrity of the special prosecutor's probe of certain cases involving abusive interrogations of detainees that ended without charges being filed against CIA officers.
"If the CIA went farther than what was approved in the torture memos that would contradict the decision by the special prosecutor not to go after anyone," Mickum said. "The release of the report, if that happens, could force the government to explain why that decision was made. But I don't hold out any hope that will ever happen."

CIA 'tortured and sodomised' terror suspect, human rights court rules
Landmark European court of human rights judgment says CIA tortured wrongly detained German citizen

The Guardian, Thursday 13 December 2012 13.54 EST

The European court of human rights has ruled German citizen Khaled el-Masri was tortured by CIA agents, the first time the court has described treatment meted out by the CIA as torture. Photograph: Christian Hartmann/AP
CIA agents tortured a German citizen, sodomising, shackling, and beating him, as Macedonian state police looked on, the European court of human rights said in a historic judgment released on Thursday.

In a unanimous ruling, it also found Macedonia guilty of torturing, abusing, and secretly imprisoning Khaled el-Masri, a German of Lebanese origin allegedly linked to terrorist organisations.

Masri was seized in Macedonia in December 2003 and handed over to a CIA "rendition team" at Skopje airport and secretly flown to Afghanistan.

It is the first time the court has described CIA treatment meted out to terror suspects as torture.

"The grand chamber of the European court of human rights unanimously found that Mr el-Masri was subjected to forced disappearance, unlawful detention, extraordinary rendition outside any judicial process, and inhuman and degrading treatment," said James Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative.

He described the judgment as "an authoritative condemnation of some of the most objectionable tactics employed in the post-9/11 war on terror". It should be a wake-up call for the Obama administration and US courts, he told the Guardian. For them to continue to avoid serious scrutiny of CIA activities was "simply unacceptable", he said.

Jamil Dakwar, of the American Civil Liberties Union, described the ruling as "a huge victory for justice and the rule of law".

The use of CIA interrogation methods widely denounced as torture during the Bush administration's "war on terror" also came under scrutiny in Congress on Thursday. The US Senate's select committee on intelligence was expected to vote on whether to approve a mammoth review it has undertaken into the controversial practices that included waterboarding, stress positions, forced nudity, beatings and sleep and sensory deprivation.

The report, that runs to almost 6,000 pages based on a three-year review of more than 6m pieces of information, is believed to conclude that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" adopted by the CIA during the Bush years did not produce any major breakthroughs in intelligence, contrary to previous claims. The committee, which is dominated by the Democrats, is likely to vote to approve the report, though opposition from the Republican members may prevent the report ever seeing the light of day.

The Strasbourg court said it found Masri's account of what happened to him "to be established beyond reasonable doubt" and that Macedonia had been "responsible for his torture and ill-treatment both in the country itself and after his transfer to the US authorities in the context of an extra-judicial 'rendition'".

In January 2004, Macedonian police took him to a hotel in Skopje, where he was kept locked in a room for 23 days and questioned in English, despite his limited proficiency in that language, about his alleged ties with terrorist organisations, the court said in its judgment. His requests to contact the German embassy were refused. At one point, when he said he intended to leave, he was threatened with being shot.

"Masri's treatment at Skopje airport at the hands of the CIA rendition team – being severely beaten, sodomised, shackled and hooded, and subjected to total sensory deprivation – had been carried out in the presence of state officials of [Macedonia] and within its jurisdiction," the court ruled.

It added: "Its government was consequently responsible for those acts performed by foreign officials. It had failed to submit any arguments explaining or justifying the degree of force used or the necessity of the invasive and potentially debasing measures. Those measures had been used with premeditation, the aim being to cause Mr Masri severe pain or suffering in order to obtain information. In the court's view, such treatment had amounted to torture, in violation of Article 3 [of the European human rights convention]."

In Afghanistan, Masri was incarcerated for more than four months in a small, dirty, dark concrete cell in a brick factory near the capital, Kabul, where he was repeatedly interrogated and was beaten, kicked and threatened. His repeated requests to meet with a representative of the German government were ignored, said the court.

Masri was released in April 2004. He was taken, blindfolded and handcuffed, by plane to Albania and subsequently to Germany, after the CIA admited he was wrongly detained. The Macedonian government, which the court ordered must pay Masri €60,000 (£49,000) in compensation, has denied involvement in kidnapping.

UN special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism, Ben Emmerson, described the ruling as "a key milestone in the long struggle to secure accountability of public officials implicated in human rights violations committed by the Bush administration CIA in its policy of secret detention, rendition and torture".

He said the US government must issue an apology for its "central role in a web of systematic crimes and human rights violations by the Bush-era CIA, and to pay voluntary compensation to Mr el-Masri".

Germany should ensure that the US officials involved in this case were now brought to trial.

[8bitagent]

Just like the Bush and Obama regimes love their true Orwellian newspeak("kill lists? You mean disposition matrix! Torture? You mean enhanced interrogation! War on terror? You mean Global contingency plans!")
they ALSO love the limited hangout.

For as brutal as the CIA was to so called al Qaeda suspects, often times a lot of the Saw/Hostel horror show was outsourced to Iraqi police, Eastern European ship gulags and Egyptian authorities.

All Americans hear is "water boarding", a sickening limited hangout trickster misdirection. People should hear what happened to Abu Zubaida

[seemslikeadream]

Senate under pressure to release mammoth report on CIA interrogation
Republican senators could move to keep under wraps a 6,000-page report detailing CIA methods during 'war on terror'
Ed Pilkington in New York

guardian.co.uk, Thursday 13 December 2012 13.45 EST

A prominent Senate select committee has voted to approve a 6,000-page report of its investigation into controversial interrogation techniques adopted by the CIA during the so-called "war on terror" that is believed to show that the methods, widely denounced as torture, produced little valuable intelligence.

The Senate select committee on intelligence voted by nine to six on Thursday to adopt the report, which will now be passed to the Obama administration for review. It is the result of a mammoth three-year investigation into the exceptional CIA interrogation methods that were permitted by the Bush administration.

Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic head of the committee, has called the inquiry the "most definitive review of this CIA programme to be conducted".

The positive vote was greeted warmly by human rights groups. Melina Milazzo of Human Rights First said: "By voting to adopt this report, the committee has sent a clear message that torture and abuse have no place in US intelligence operations," said Human Rights First's Melina Milazzo.

The majority Democratic members of the committee were joined by one Republican senator, Olympia Snowe of Maine, in backing the report. However, lack of co-operation from the remaining Republican members of the panel could prevent the document ever seeing the light of day.

Some of the top retired military leaders in the US have appealed to the committee to adopt the report and to publish it with as few redactions as possible. A joint letter from 26 of them – including retired marine generals Joseph Hoar, former commander-in-chief of United States Central Command, and Charles Krulak, former commandant of the marine corps – was sent to the committee on Wednesday protesting the Bush administration's use of torture.

"As retired generals and admirals," the letter reads, "we know that torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment produces unreliable results and often impedes further intelligence collection. Torture is unlawful, immoral and counterproductive."

Yet, the letter continues, it is still argued today that torture led to the killing of Osama bin Laden, and that the CIA should still have the power to engage in such practices. "The committee's comprehensive review will demonstrate the negative impact of torture on our national security and stand as a testament against those who urge otherwise."

The Senate has spent the past three years investigating the CIA's detention and enhanced interrogation techniques for the period beginning in 2002 after 9/11 and the start of the war in Afghanistan and ending in 2009 when incoming President Barack Obama banned the use of torture. The controversial practices included waterboarding, stress positions, forced nudity, beatings and sleep and sensory deprivation as well as the "rendition" or extra-legal extradition of terror suspects to a network of secret prisons.

The report runs to almost 6,000 pages and is based on more than 6m pieces of information. Feinstein has said that the report is "comprehensive, it is strictly factual, and it is the most definitive review of this CIA programme to be conducted".

It is believed to conclude that the "enhanced interrogation techniques" adopted by the CIA during the Bush years did not produce any major breakthroughs in intelligence. The finding, if confirmed, would contradict previous claims by President Bush himself, his vice-president Dick Cheney and other prominent Bush administration figures who said that extreme interrogation methods allowed the CIA to extract valuable intelligence from a small number of high-level detainees.

Most incendiary have been the claims that such brutal techniques were seminal in tracking down and killing Bin Laden in his hideout in Abbottabad, Pakistan in May 2011. The Senate report is believed to conclude that effective torture did not play a central role in finding the al-Qaida mastermind.

Earlier this year, Feinstein said: "The suggestion that the operation was carried out based on information gained through the harsh treatment of CIA detainees is not only inaccurate, it trivialises the work of individuals across multiple US agencies that led to Bin Laden and the eventual operation."

The controversy over the role that extreme interrogation methods such as waterboarding played in the hunt for Bin Laden has resurfaced this week with the release of the feature film Zero Dark Thirty which contains graphic re-enactments of the techniques and implies the methods succeeded in extracting key information. Several US senators have protested the portrayal.

Paradoxically, the brutal techniques adopted by the CIA during the Bush years were based on those used by Communist Chinese interrogators during the Korean war. US soldiers being sent to the far east were trained to recognise the techniques so that they might resist them more effectively should they be captured.

It is not yet clear what strategy the Republican senators on the select committee will take. They essentially boycotted the investigation in 2009 in protest at the decision by Obama to ask the department of justice to launch a separate inquiry into whether the CIA programme was in breach of the law (earlier this year the DoJ dropped its investigation with no criminal charges).

Feinstein said the decision on whether or not to release the report would be taken at a later date.