Treatment of 9/11 suspects won't be disclosed at trial

LATimes
Richard A. Serrano

A military judge says details of the harsh interrogations of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other terrorism defendants can't be mentioned in court. Human rights advocates object.

Khalid Shaikh Mohammed pictured in July at the U.S. prison at
Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Details of his harsh treatment will
not be permitted at his terrorism trial. 

 

 

WASHINGTON — The judge in the military commission case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other suspected Sept. 11 plotters ruled that details of harsh interrogation techniques used on them would be kept secret during their trial, a decision that human rights advocates called an attempt to hide the fact that the men were tortured.

The order, signed by Army Col. James L. Pohl on Dec. 6 and made public Wednesday, represents a clear victory for U.S. military and Justice Department prosecutors in the opening round of pretrial disputes. The first and only trial in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks could begin as soon as next year.

Prosecutors had wanted all information about the five men's arrests and treatment at so-called black sites abroad to remain classified. Pohl agreed even though some government officials have acknowledged that Mohammed, for instance, was waterboarded 183 times after his 2003 capture in Pakistan. Waterboarding simulates drowning; many consider it torture.

Nevertheless, Pohl ruled that "enhanced interrogation techniques that were applied to the accused … including descriptions of the techniques as applied, the duration, frequency, sequencing and limitations of those techniques," would remain classified. Nor will he permit the defendants or their attorneys to discuss those matters in legal papers or open court.

"Names, identities and physical descriptions of any persons involved with the capture, transfer, detention or interrogation" of the accused will not be released, he said, nor will any "information that would reveal or tend to reveal the foreign countries" where the suspects were held before their transfer to the prison at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Pohl approved a 40-second audio delay in future proceedings to further protect classified information.

His "Protective Order No. 1" marks one of the most significant rulings in a case with worldwide interest in how the U.S. handles terrorism suspects as families await justice for nearly 3,000 loved ones killed in the airliner attacks at New York City's World Trade Center, the Pentagon outside Washington and a farm field in western Pennsylvania.

Defense lawyers, the American Civil Liberties Union and a group of news organizations — including the Tribune Co., owner of the Los Angeles Times — had urged the judge to permit disclosure of this information.

"We're profoundly disappointed," said Hina Shamsi, an ACLU lawyer, adding that she would probably appeal the protective order. "The government wanted to ensure that the American public would never hear the defendants' accounts of illegal CIA torture, rendition and detention, and the military judge has gone along with that shameful plan."

Eugene Fidell, a military law expert at Yale Law School, said many would view the ruling as the government's attempt to try the men in secrecy despite new military commission safeguards under the Obama administration that promised transparency.

Judge Bans the T-Word in 9/11 Hearing

Huffington Post
Daphne Eviatar

It didn't take long for the word "torture" to rear its ugly head in the September 11th terrorism case, as pre-trial hearings began today with a slew of procedural issues. Though the question of whether the five accused men have to actually show up in court every day wouldn't seem all that exciting or controversial, as soon as one of the defense lawyers started to say his client was traumatized by having been tortured at the hands of his U.S. interrogators, the judge shut him up.

"We have to talk about torture," said defense attorney Captain Michael Schwartz, who represents Walid Bin Attash, claiming it's relevant to whether the accused should be "forcibly extracted" from their prison cells.

"No we don't. I'm telling you I don't think it's relevant to this issue," said Judge James L. Pohl, presiding over the military commission case of the five 9/11 co-defendants. "I'm not going to keep revisiting the issue I told you is not relevant."

Schwartz tried to explain. "There is the physical and emotional strain that is relevant to the decision of whether they're going to come to court. Those things are inextricably linked."

Pohl quickly interrupted. "The issue before me is whether or not the accused has a right to voluntarily choose to not come to court for these proceedings. The issue of why is not before me... I don't think that's relevant."

Schwartz looked bewildered, but persisted. "The issue of my client's ability to participate in his defense is relevant," he insisted.

Judge Pohl: "No it's not. When I say it's irrelevant, we're done." Pohl refused to allow Captain Scwhartz to even make his claim for the record, which he presumably wanted to do to preserve a later right to appeal.

Ultimately, Judge Pohl ended the discussion by ruling in the defense lawyers' favor, saying he'd allow the defendants to waive their right to attend their hearings and trial so long as they did it knowingly and following a set of procedures he would set out this afternoon.

That short exchange gives us an interesting clue of how the word "torture" and related claims of detainee mistreatment are likely to be treated as this September 11 terrorism trial finally gets underway.

Secrecy surrounding the detainees' treatment in U.S. custody -- including their having been subjected to "enhanced interrogation techniques" that amount to torture -- will play a much larger role in motions expected to be argued tomorrow.

Malaysian tribunal finds Bush guilty of war crimes

PressTV

A symbolic War Crimes Tribunal in Malaysia has found former US President George W. Bush and several other members of his administration guilty of war crimes and crimes against humanity , Press TV reports.

The second “Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Tribunal”, part of an initiative by former Malaysian premier Mahathir Mohamad, in a unanimous vote on Saturday found Bush and seven of his associates, including former Vice President Dick Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld guilty of torture and war crimes.

The court also heard evidence from former detainees in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, of torture methods used by US soldiers during their captivity in prisons run by American forces.

A former inmate, Abbas Abid appeared in a scarf fearing reprisals. He enacted how US troops subjected him to electric shocks, beatings and sexual abuse over a number of months.

High ranking former UN officials present in the courtroom expressed frustration over the evidence. “The UN is a weak body ... and it’s corrupted by member states, who use the Security Council for their own interests. They don’t respect the charter. They don’t respect the international law. They don’t respect the Geneva Conventions,” former UN Assistant Secretary General, Denis Halliday told Press TV.

NAPOLITANO: Trading fair trial for vengeance

Washington Times
Andrew P. Napolitano

New rules for 9/11 terrorists’ prosecution could crush Constitution

The trial of the alleged masterminds of Sept. 11, which began last week at the U.S. Naval Base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will address some of the most profound issues of our era. Are natural rights truly inalienable, as Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, or can the government take them away from those it hates or fears? Does the Constitution protect the rights of all persons who come in contact with the government, or does it protect only certain Americans, as the government argues? Can the government deny a person due process by changing the rules retroactively, or is the Constitution’s guarantee of due process to all persons truly a guarantee?

These are all questions that the government does not want to answer, but it should know better. By structuring the trial after the crime was committed and establishing retroactive rules - prohibited by the Constitution - that have never before been used in any American civilian or military court, Congress has created and the Obama administration will conduct a trial that will resemble none in our history.

The trial is being held in Cuba because President Obama caved in to political pressure from New York City politicians who did not want the trial at the location where the murders took place. In one of the few rules of criminal procedure laid down in the Constitution, the Framers required all trials to be held in the same judicial district where the alleged crime took place. They were familiar with the British practice of trying colonists in London for crimes alleged to have been committed in New York. But today, New York politicians, their allies in Congress and the president think they can pick and choose which parts of the Constitution to uphold and which parts they can ignore.

The Constitution guarantees the right to confront evidence and witnesses. The colonists were all too familiar with the Star Chamber, a British trial system in which evidence against an accused was summarized by a clerk of the court rather than presented by witnesses with personal knowledge or revealed in documents for all to see. In trials at Gitmo, the government may summarize evidence for the court, and it may keep documents it plans to use away from the defendants.

The rules for this trial also permit hearsay - basically, anonymous accusations that also were the hallmark of the Star Chamber. They permit the secretary of defense, who is the boss of both the prosecutors and the judge, to replace the judge if the secretary is displeased by his rulings. This is a procedure that is taken right out of the Communist Party playbook from the Stalinist Soviet Union.

No Real Justice in Guantanamo

Common Dreams
Reed Brody

Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, seen in an undated handout image from the FBI, is charged with being a key organizer of
Al Qaeda's attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole in 2000,
which killed 17 U.S. servicemen.

Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, wearing white prison clothes, seemed by turns amused and bewildered as he sat in a bright room last week during a pretrial hearing at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Nashiri is charged with being a key organizer of Al Qaeda's attack on the U.S. destroyer Cole on Oct. 12, 2000, off the coast of Yemen, which killed 17 U.S. servicemen, as well as of two other attacks. He faces the death penalty if convicted in a trial before a military commission that is scheduled to begin in November.

The Nashiri case is seen as a dry run for the trial of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and four other alleged planners of the Sept. 11 attacks, who will be arraigned in Guantanamo on May 5. But it is also important in its own right. He is accused of dreadful crimes, but even if he is found guilty, his execution would be a deeply disturbing end to a long ordeal of abuse in an archipelago of secret U.S. prisons around the world.

Nashiri was captured in Dubai in October 2002 and secretly transferred to CIA custody. He was reportedly first taken to a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan known as the "Salt Pit," then to another secret jail in Bangkok, Thailand.

A report by the CIA's inspector general details a range of abuses to which Nashiri was subjected, including waterboarding. He was sent on to Poland, where he was, according to the report, threatened with a power drill revved near his head while he was hooded but otherwise naked. His captors also cocked a semiautomatic handgun close to his head as he sat shackled, held him in "standing stress positions" and threatened to sexually abuse his mother in front of him.

In 2003, he was flown out of Poland, presumably to other secret CIA jails. It was not until September 2006 that the United States government acknowledged his secret detention and that he was at that time being held in Guantanamo.

Last week's hearing, which I attended, dealt with, among other things, Nashiri's request that his feet be unshackled during meetings with his attorneys. A select number of observers from nongovernmental organizations were permitted to watch from behind a soundproof glass wall at the back of the courtroom. A video and audio feed was piped in on a 40-second delay — enough time to censor any classified information that came up.

How the US uses sexual humiliation as a political tool to control the masses

OpEdNews
Naomi Wolf

In a five-four ruling this week, the supreme court decided that anyone can be strip-searched upon arrest for any offense, however minor, at any time. This horror show ruling joins two recent horror show laws: the NDAA, which lets anyone be arrested forever at any time, and HR 347, the "trespass bill," which gives you a 10-year sentence for protesting anywhere near someone with secret service protection. These criminalizations of being human follow, of course, the mini-uprising of the Occupy movement.

Is American strip-searching benign? The man who had brought the initial suit, Albert Florence, described having been told to "turn around. Squat and cough. Spread your cheeks." He said he felt humiliated: "It made me feel like less of a man."

In surreal reasoning, Justice Anthony Kennedy explained that this ruling is necessary because the 9/11 bomber could have been stopped for speeding. How would strip searching him have prevented the attack? Did Justice Kennedy imagine that plans to blow up the twin towers had been concealed in a body cavity? In still more bizarre non-logic, his and the other justices' decision rests on concerns about weapons and contraband in prison systems. But people under arrest -- that is, who are not yet convicted -- haven't been introduced into a prison population.

Our surveillance state shows considerable determination to intrude on citizens sexually. There's the sexual abuse of prisoners at Bagram -- der Spiegel reports that "former inmates report incidents of ... various forms of sexual humiliation. In some cases, an interrogator would place his penis along the face of the detainee while he was being questioned. Other inmates were raped with sticks or threatened with anal sex." There was the stripping of Bradley Manning in solitary confinement. And there's the policy set up after the story of the "underwear bomber" to grope US travelers genitally or else force them to go through a machine -- made by a company, Rapiscan, owned by terror profiteer and former DHA czar Michael Chertoff -- with images so vivid that it has been called the "pornoscanner."

Believe me: you don't want the state having the power to strip your clothes off. History shows that the use of forced nudity by a state that is descending into fascism is powerfully effective in controlling and subduing populations.

The political use of forced nudity by anti-democratic regimes is long established. Forcing people to undress is the first step in breaking down their sense of individuality and dignity and reinforcing their powerlessness. Enslaved women were sold naked on the blocks in the American south, and adolescent male slaves served young white ladies at table in the south, while they themselves were naked: their invisible humiliation was a trope for their emasculation. Jewish prisoners herded into concentration camps were stripped of clothing and photographed naked, as iconic images of that Holocaust reiterated.

Dick Cheney cancels Toronto visit over security concerns

Former U.S. vice-president Dick Cheney has cancelled a Canadian speaking appearance due to security concerns sparked by demonstrations during a visit he made to Vancouver last fall, the event promoter said Monday.

Cheney, whom the protesters denounced as a war criminal, was slated to talk about his experiences in office and the current American political situation at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre on April 24.

However, Ryan Ruppert, of Spectre Live Corp., said Cheney and his daughter Elizabeth had begged off via their agent.

"After speaking with their security advisers, they changed their mind on coming to the event," Ruppert said.

"(They) decided it was better for their personal safety they stay out of Canada."

Last Sept. 26, Cheney's appearance in Vancouver was marred by demonstrators who blocked the entrances to the exclusive Vancouver Club.

The activists, who at one point scuffled with police, called for Cheney's arrest for war crimes and booed guests as they arrived at the $500-a-ticket dinner.

One man was arrested for choking a club staff member.

Ruppert said the "thugs" put everyone at risk and forced Cheney to remain inside the club for seven hours until police were able to disperse the protesters and deem it safe for him to leave.

"It was a complete disaster for them because it's a major security issue," he said.

The upshot, he said, is that discussion over American policy on such issues as Guantanamo Bay or the Iraq war is being silenced.

"You lost that conversation because you're talking about a group of thugs," Ruppert said.

"It's a real sad story because it really overshadows what the peaceful protesters, who often have very legitimate points, would be doing and saying."

Those who bought tickets to the Cheney event can either get a full refund or exchange them for an appearance by free-speech activist, Mark Steyn.

"It's incredibly disappointing for us," said Ruppert, who was planning for as many as 5,000 people to attend the Cheneys' talk.

"We were very excited about this event."

Rupert did not say how many tickets had already been sold at prices ranging from $79 to $595.

Cheney critics accuse him of endorsing the use of water boarding and sleep deprivation against detainees while serving in former president George W. Bush's administration.

Before the Vancouver event, Human Rights Watch urged the federal government to bring criminal charges against Cheney, accusing him of playing a role in the torture of detainees.

Don Davies, the NDP immigration critic, also argued that Cheney should not have been allowed into Canada.

Cheney has vigorously defended interrogation techniques on the grounds they saved hundreds of thousands of lives.

U.N. rights chief: Guantonamo a Clear Breach of International Law

(AP) GENEVA - The U.N. human rights chief says the U.S. government must close the Guantanamo Bay prison as President Barack Obama promised a year ago.

Navi Pillay, the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, says "the facility continues to exist and individuals remain arbitrarily detained — indefinitely — in clear breach of international law."

Obama pledged to shutter the U.S. Naval Base prison in Cuba in his annual address to Congress last year.

Pillay said Monday — ahead of Obama's next annual speech Tuesday — that she is deeply disappointed the U.S. government "has instead entrenched a system of arbitrary detention."

Pillay said she also is "disturbed at the failure to ensure accountability for serious human rights violations, including torture, that took place."

Unexpected Road Block to Afghanistan Peace: Gitmo

Wired

Negotiating a peace deal with the Taliban after 10 years of war in Afghanistan is hard enough. But the stalemated politics of the Guantanamo Bay detention facility risk effectively killing the negotiations before they even have the chance to end the war.

The Taliban leadership has evidently decided it wants to talk peace terms. Among the things it wants as a gesture of good faith from its U.S. adversaries: the release of five detainees from Guantanamo.

Provisions in the defense bill recently signed into law by President Obama make it difficult to transfer detainees out of Guantanamo Bay, the terrorism detention complex that turns 10 years old this week. But they’re a symptom of a greater obstacle to a peace deal: Congress’ broad, bipartisan allergy to releasing any detainees from Gitmo at all.

The calendar actually makes it worse than that. 2012 is an election year. Opening Guantanamo Bay’s doors as a gesture to the Taliban is a narrative practically begging for a political attack ad.

Proposed Guantanamo lawyer-inmate rule sparks backlash

Globe and Mail
Ben Fox
Adam Goldman

The new commander of the Guantanamo Bay prison wants a team of government and law enforcement officials to be allowed to review all communications between lawyers and inmates accused of helping organize the Sept. 11 attacks, The Associated Press has learned.

The proposed changes, contained in a 27-page draft order, have sparked a backlash from the Pentagon-appointed lawyers representing the five Guantanamo prisoners charged in the attacks. They say the new rules would violate attorney-client privilege and legal ethics and deprive the prisoners of their constitutional right to counsel.

The order is still in draft form and has not yet been signed by the commander, a detention centre spokeswoman, Navy Cmdr. Tamsen Reese, said Tuesday. She said the commander was not immediately available for an interview.

Lawyers for the Sept. 11 prisoners received the draft order from the commander, Navy Rear Adm. David Woods, on Dec. 22 and were told to sign an agreement to abide by the rules within 48 hours.
Instead, they sent a written response contending that requiring them to abide by such rules in order to see their clients was illegal.

“This requirement, as a precursor to engaging in client communications, interferes with the attorney-client relationship, compels counsel to violate ethical obligations, and therefore renders it impossible for counsel to effectively represent our clients,” they wrote, appealing for more time to review the proposed order.

The memo was signed by at least one member of each legal team representing the five prisoners, according to a military official who spoke on condition of anonymity because the document had not been publicly released.

Obama to sign indefinite detention bill into law

Salon
Glen Greenwald

In one of the least surprising developments imaginable, President Obama – after spending months threatening to veto the Levin/McCain detention bill – yesterday announced that he would instead sign it into law (this is the same individual, of course, who unequivocally vowed when seeking the Democratic nomination to support a filibuster of “any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecom[s],” only to turn around – once he had the nomination secure — and not only vote against such a filibuster, but to vote in favor of the underlying bill itself, so this is perfectly consistent with his past conduct). As a result, the final version of the Levin/McCain bill will be enshrined as law this week as part of the the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). I wrote about the primary provisions and implications of this bill last week, and won’t repeat those points here.

The ACLU said last night that the bill contains “harmful provisions that some legislators have said could authorize the U.S. military to pick up and imprison without charge or trial civilians, including American citizens, anywhere in the world” and added: “if President Obama signs this bill, it will damage his legacy.” Human Rights Watch said that Obama’s decision “does enormous damage to the rule of law both in the US and abroad” and that “President Obama will go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.”

Both groups pointed out that this is the first time indefinite detention has been enshrined in law since the McCarthy era of the 1950s, when — as the ACLU put it — “President Truman had the courage to veto” the Internal Security Act of 1950 on the ground that it “would make a mockery of our Bill of Rights” and then watched Congress override the veto. That Act authorized the imprisonment of Communists and other “subversives” without the necessity of full trials or due process (many of the most egregious provisions of that bill were repealed by the1971 Non-Detention Act, and are now being rejuvenated by these War on Terror policies of indefinite detention). President Obama, needless to say, is not Harry Truman. He’s not even the Candidate Obama of 2008 who repeatedly insisted that due process and security were not mutually exclusive and whocondemned indefinite detention as “black hole” injustice.

There have been several persistent myths circulating about this bill and President Obama’s position on it that need to be clarified once and for all:

First, while the powers this bill enshrines are indeed radical and dangerous, most of them already exist. That’s because first the Bush administration and now the Obama administration have aggressively argued that the original 2001 AUMF already empowers them to imprison people without charges, use force against even U.S. citizens without due process (Anwar Awlaki), and target not only members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban (as the law states) but also anyone who “substantially supports” those groups and/or “associated forces” (whatever those terms mean). That’s why this bill states that it does not intend to change the 2001 AUMF (even as it codifies far broader language defining the scope of the war) or the detention powers of the President, and it’s why they purposely made the bill vague on whether it expressly authorizes military detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil: it’s because the bill’s proponents and the White House both believe that the President already possesses these broadened powers with or without this bill. With a couple of exceptions, this bill just “clarifies” — and codifies — the powers President Obama has already claimed, seized and exercised.

Former US chief prosecutor calls for prosecution of Bush officials for torture

The Guardian

Ten years on from its creation, calls are mounting from legal and human rights experts for closure of the 'torture' centre on Cuba

A shackled detainee is taken from a vehicle for
interrogation at Camp Delta, at the Guantanamo
base in Cuba in 2006.

The former chief prosecutor for the US government at Guantánamo Bay has accused the administration he served of operating a "law-free zone" there, on the eve of the 10th anniversary of the order to establish the detention camp on Cuba.

Retired air force colonel Morris Davis resigned in October 2007 in protest against interrogation methods at Guantánamo, and has made his remarks in the lead-up to 13 November, the anniversary of President George W Bush's executive order setting up military commissions to try terrorist suspects.

Davis said that the methods of interrogation used on Guantánamo detainees – which he described as "torture" – were in breach of the US's own statutes on torture, and added: "If torture is a crime, it should be prosecuted."

The US military, he said, had been ordered to use unlawful methods of interrogation by "civilian politicians, and to do so against our will and judgment".

Davis was speaking at a conference on human rights law at Bard College in New York state. After resigning from the armed forces, in a dramatic defection to the other side of the raging debate over conditions at the camp, he became executive director of, and counsel to, the Crimes of War project based in Washington DC. The speech was to launch the project's 10th anniversary campaign and to protest against the existence of the camp and the torture there and at so-called "black sites" run by US intelligence around the world.

Images of Occupy Portland

Obama: A disaster for civil liberties

Los Angeles Times
By Jonathan Turley

He may prove the most disastrous president in our history in terms of civil liberties.

President Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay, continued
warrantless surveillance and military tribunals and asserted
the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists.

With the 2012 presidential election before us, the country is again caught up in debating national security issues, our ongoing wars and the threat of terrorism. There is one related subject, however, that is rarely mentioned: civil liberties.

Protecting individual rights and liberties — apart from the right to be tax-free — seems barely relevant to candidates or voters. One man is primarily responsible for the disappearance of civil liberties from the national debate, and he is Barack Obama. While many are reluctant to admit it, Obama has proved a disaster not just for specific civil liberties but the civil liberties cause in the United States.

Civil libertarians have long had a dysfunctional relationship with the Democratic Party, which treats them as a captive voting bloc with nowhere else to turn in elections. Not even this history, however, prepared civil libertarians for Obama. After the George W. Bush
years, they were ready to fight to regain ground lost after Sept. 11. Historically, this country has tended to correct periods of heightened police powers with a pendulum swing back toward greater individual rights. Many were questioning the extreme measures taken by the Bush administration, especially after the disclosure of abuses and illegalities. Candidate Obama capitalized on this swing and portrayed himself as the champion of civil liberties.
 
However, President Obama not only retained the controversial Bush policies, he expanded on them. The earliest, and most startling, move came quickly. Soon after his election, various military and political figures reported that Obama reportedly promised Bush officials in private that no one would be investigated or prosecuted for torture. In his first year, Obama made good on that promise, announcing that no CIA employee would be prosecuted for torture. Later, his administration refused to prosecute any of the Bush officials responsible for ordering or justifying the program and embraced the "just following orders" defense for other officials, the very defense rejected by the United States at the Nuremberg trials after World War II.

Obama failed to close Guantanamo Bay as promised. He continued warrantless surveillance and military tribunals that denied defendants basic rights. He asserted the right to kill U.S. citizens he views as terrorists. His administration has fought to block dozens of public-interest lawsuits challenging privacy violations and presidential abuses.

But perhaps the biggest blow to civil liberties is what he has done to the movement itself. It has quieted to a whisper, muted by the power of Obama's personality and his symbolic importance as the first black president as well as the liberal who replaced Bush. Indeed, only a few days after he took office, the Nobel committee awarded him the Nobel Peace Prize without his having a single accomplishment to his credit beyond being elected. Many Democrats were, and remain, enraptured.

Former Guantanamo prisoner arrested in Egypt

Bykyamasr
Desmond Shephard

CAIRO: Egypt has arrested a man who returned to his native country after having been jailed at the United States’ Guantanamo Bay prison. Adel al-Gazzar spoke briefly with reporters on Monday, saying he was not returning to the country to be imprisoned and tortured.

His lawyer has responded to the arrest, saying that the military is using “trumped-up charges” to detain his client.

In comments published by Al-Jazeera, Katie Taylor of Reprieve, a legal charity based in the UK and which represents prisoners in Guantanamo Bay, said that al-Gazzar had suffered a “decade-long ordeal of torture and detention without trial."

“He arrived home to Egypt, only to face further discredited, trumped-up charges,” she added.

Al-Gazzar, however, had been sentenced in absentia in 2001 for his alleged affiliation with a group called al-Wa’ad.

Mark Jones, an international security expert and a former consultant for the State Department on prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, told Bikya Masr that al-Gazzar should not need to serve any more time in prison, despite the previous case against him.

“The man has already spent 10 years in a horrible prison in Guantanamo and now the Egyptians feel it is necessary to imprison him again in their own, poor prison system?” he said, adding that “it just doesn’t make any logical sense. The man deserves to be free and get on with his life, not spend another three years in jail.”

All this comes on the heels of the military admitting on Monday to human rights workers that they had sentenced over 7,000 civilians to prison using military courts since former President Hosni Mubarak was forced out of office by street demonstrations in January and February. That number has left many human rights organization, activists and advocates of free speech and assembly angered over what they are now saying are excesses that are close to, if not on par with, the former regime.

Hafez Abu Saeda, the head of the Egyptian Organization for Human Rights (EOHR) told Bikya Masr that it was “unacceptable” to continue the same practices of the Mubarak government. He said that although he understands the military is attempting to maintain order, “there must be transparency and they must follow the rule of law if we are to get Egypt back on the right track.”

For al-Gazzar, a decade in American confinement appears not enough to satisfy the Egyptian interim government at present, but according to Iranian professor and expert on Islamist movements Zahir Mustafa, it is exactly what the radical groups in the region want.

“We must be careful that these situations do not continue because it is a great way to foment anger and recruitment among the more conservative circles in the country,” the professor said.

Obama gives upon plan for 9/11 civilian trials

NewsObserver

WASHINGTON — In an about-face on the day President Barack Obama announced his re-election bid, Attorney General Eric Holder on Monday ordered that confessed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other alleged co-plotters stand trial before a military commission at Guantanamo rather than in a civilian court.

It was an embarrassing reversal nearly a year and a half after Holder announced with much fanfare that the five men, who'd been held for years in secret CIA custody before being transferred to the Guantanamo military prison in 2006, would face justice in a courtroom in lower Manhattan.
Holder blamed the decision on Congress for prohibiting the transfer of Guantanamo detainees to the U.S., even for trial.

 
"We must face a simple truth, those restrictions are unlikely to be repealed in the immediate future. And we simply cannot allow a trial to be delayed any longer for the victims of the 9/11attacks or for their family members who have waited nearly a decade for justice," Holder said.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks killed 2,976 people when four hijacked airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a field in southwest Pennsylvania.

Holder also revealed that a grand jury had secretly indicted the five men on Dec. 14, 2009, alleging, among other things, that Mohammed had trained the hijackers "by killing sheep and camels" with short-bladed knives similar to the box cutters used in the terror attacks.

That indictment, which was withdrawn Monday, came a year before Congress stepped in and blocked transfers of detainees to U.S. soil. But even before Congress acted, Holder said the Justice Department had delayed the transfer out of concern about security for a trial in Manhattan. At one time, he said, he considered staging the trial at the Otisville Federal Prison, 70 miles northwest of New York, near the Pennsylvania and New Jersey borders.

"The best venue for prosecution was in federal court," he said. "I stand by that decision today."
Families who lost loved ones to the attacks offered mixed reviews of the decision. Most members of Congress endorsed it.

At the Pentagon, the chief war crimes prosecutor, Navy Capt. John F. Murphy, said his lawyers would prepare charge sheets "in the near future" against Mohammed, 45, Ramzi bin al Shibh, 37, Walid bin Attash, 32, Ammar al Baluchi, 32, and Mustafa Hawsawi, 41.

All have been held at Guantanamo since September 2006, following years in secret CIA custody during which Mohammed was waterboarded 183 times. The five had been charged in the military commission system before, during the George W. Bush presidency, but that case was dismissed in November 2009 when Holder announced plans for a civilian trial.

Murphy declined to say whether he would seek the death penalty — a key issue. Mohammed has said previously that he'd confess to the plot and seek the death penalty as a fast-track to martyrdom. But it is unclear whether a military judge who accepts a guilty plea can also sentence someone to death.
The timing of the announcement was surprising: the day President Barack Obama launched his re-election bid. It also came one day before the House Judiciary Committee was to hold a hearing on military commissions where relatives of 9/11 victims were expected to hold up pictures of their dead loved ones to protest administration policy.

"It is my hope that today's announcement means that long-delayed accountability will finally be served on the terrorists who killed thousands of Americans on 9/11," said retired Navy Cmdr. Kirk Lippold, who was the captain of the USS Cole in October 2000 when an al Qaida suicide bomber attacked the destroyer off Yemen, killing 17 U.S. sailors.

Lippold, an architect of Bush-era Guantanamo policy, accused the Obama administration of "political waffling" rather than "fortitude and leadership."

The September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows group declared itself "profoundly disappointed" by what it called "a step backward in our hopes that justice will be served."

"The shame of Guantanamo will continue," the group said in a statement. "As families of those who were murdered on that day, we have waited nearly 10 years to see those who committed these savage criminal acts to be brought to justice."


Reaction from Congress, which had voted to block a U.S. federal trial through funding bans, ranged from triumph to relief that New York would be spared the trial.

"As I have been saying all along, these terror trials belong in a military commission at Guantanamo. I am absolutely shocked that it took Attorney General Holder 507 days to come to this realization," said New York Rep. Peter King, the Republican chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee.
Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., who helped create the military commission system, said he appreciated Holder's decision to use it for the trials.

"Military commissions have been used in wars throughout our history, and they should be used in this war," said Graham, a military lawyer who's served active duty in Iraq and Afghanistan. "The commission trials will be transparent, conducted by the same judges and jurors who administer justice to our own troops, and subject to civilian review. In addition, the military commissions system balances the interest of the accused with the safety of our nation as a whole in this time of war."

Sen. Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, lamented the reversal. He called the American justice system "the envy of the world" and with hundreds of terror convictions already "more than capable of trying high-profile terrorism and national security cases."
"The record in military commissions pales in comparison, with only a handful of convictions, and the ground rules still in flux," he said.

The decision resurrects a long-standing dispute about whether a military commission would be as fair as a civilian trial and whether its verdict would be as respected.

The National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers worried that the military wouldn't provide adequate funding to hire civilian defense lawyers with death-penalty experience. The group also said Obama-era reforms hadn't gone far enough in ensuring the evidence used in a case meets civilian court standards.

"Despite some cosmetic changes since the Bush-era commissions, the commission rules still permit the government to introduce secret evidence, hearsay and statements obtained through coercion," said Norman Reimer, the group's executive director.

As a candidate and senator, Obama had condemned the commissions. As president, he worked with Congress to reform them.

"It's devastating to the rule of law," said Anthony Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, blaming "politics" for the decision and arguing that the military commissions aren't capable of keeping away from the trial evidence gleaned from the CIA interrogations, often under harsh conditions.

"The very Defense Department that enabled the torture is now going to be the adjudicator of justice," he said.

The Justice Department's Dean Boyd countered that during the Obama era "among the key reforms to the Military Commissions was a ban on the admissibility of statements obtained by the use of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment."

Holder also endorsed the commissions. "I believe they can deliver fair trials and just verdicts," he said.
)(Rosenberg reports for the Miami Herald. James Rosen, Lesley Clark, Greg Gordon, Margaret Talev and Marisa Taylor contributed to this report.)

Kristin Breitweiser responds to Obama's military tribunals for alleged 9/11 conspirators

Common Dreams

Published on Tuesday, April 5, 2011 by The Huffington Post
The Sad Defeat of Our Constitution
by Kristen Breitweiser

Kristen Breitweiser

Today I was given two hours of "advance notice" regarding DOJ's decision to not prosecute the remaining alleged 9/11 conspirators in an open court of law. According to DOJ's statement, the remaining individuals will be sent to military tribunals.

I recognize that there are many, many other things for Americans to be upset with today, but I hope everyone can take a second to contemplate this decision and recognize what it says about President Obama, the Department of Justice, and the United States.

As for the Department of Justice, it shows their inability to prosecute individuals who are responsible for the death of 3,000 people on the morning of 9/11. Apparently our Constitution and judicial system -- two of the very cornerstones that make America so great and used to set such a shining example to the rest of the world -- are not adequately set up to respond to or deal with the aftermath of terrorism. To me, this is a startling and dismal acknowledgment that perhaps Osama Bin Laden did, in fact, win on the morning of 9/11. And chillingly, I wonder whether it wasn't just the steel towers that were brought down and incinerated on 9/11, but the yellowed pages of our U.S. Constitution, as well.

And what does it say about the solemn capabilities of our Department of Justice if it is left to "subcontract out" its duties and responsibilities to the Department of Defense? We should all think about that scary notion for a bit. But, perhaps more disturbingly recognize that it is not occurring under the tutelage of Bush and Cheney, rather it is coming at the hands of Obama.

At least when President Bush was in office, he was candid about his feelings regarding the alleged 9/11 conspirators in our custody. He didn't care about them. He allowed them to be tortured. He was fine letting them rot in the heat of Guantanamo for all of eternity. They were less than human to him and he certainly was never going to afford them the benefits of our U.S. Constitution or the Geneva Conventions. That was President Bush. Whether you agreed or disagreed with him, you, at least, knew where he stood. And you could, like it or not, rely on his word.

For the past two years, it's been President Obama in the Oval Office. Quite early on in his presidency, Obama invited the 9/11 families to the White House to discuss 9/11-related issues. During this meeting in Feb '09 the topic of closing Guantanamo and the use of Article 3 courts to prosecute the remaining alleged 9/11 conspirators was discussed. Many of us were incredibly relieved to learn that as a matter of course President Obama was going to shut down Guantanamo and support the open prosecution of the alleged 9/11 conspirators. He gave us -- the various widows and children at the meeting -- his golden word. He shook our hands. He smiled broadly. He posed for pictures. (In fact, several weeks later many of the widows even received hand signed courtesy copies of these photos from Obama -- a nice touch. I did not receive such a photo.)

It's been almost ten years now since my husband was killed. My daughter has gone from a 2-year-old to a 12-year-old. Our country has started two -- and now maybe three -- pointless, misguided, costly wars. And if it wasn't already difficult enough to accept that Osama Bin Laden will probably never be caught or held accountable, now I have to swallow the fact that I will never see constitutional justice for the handful of individuals we actually hold in custody. In short, justice in a court of law for the murder of my husband and 3,000 others will never come.

I suppose in life timing is everything. To me, as a lawyer and a 9/11 widow, DOJ's announcement today acknowledges the sad defeat of our U.S. Constitution when it comes to 9/11. How truly tragic in my eyes. And you would think that a man who was once a constitutional law professor might feel the same way. Yet, not so much for President Barack Obama who has chosen this great day to announce his billion-dollar campaign for re-election. His slogan asking us to "join in" by writing him a check.

First, I've never been much of an "in"-sider. Second, I truly wonder how you can trust a leader who carries no compunction to keep his promises or his word -- whether those words and promises were made in support of gay rights, to not start or perpetuate illegal/useless/costly military campaigns (or wars), in support of environmental causes even to the detriment of big business, to put an immediate end to torture and unlawful detainment, to rein in the bloat and greed of Wall Street, to oppose gun control, or to correct the broad overreach of a previous administration.

But perhaps most pointedly, if you can't trust what a man says to a group of widows and children, then what words and promises of his can you trust?

So President Obama, am I IN? Will you be receiving my check?

Hell no.

Top Bush-era GITMO and Abu Ghraib psychologist is WH's newest appointment

Jeff Greenwald
Salon.com

One of the most intense scandals the field of psychology has faced over the last

decade is the involvement of several of its members in enabling Bush's worldwide torture regime.  Numerous health professionals worked for the U.S. government to help understand how best to mentally degrade and break down detainees. At the center of that controversy was -- and is -- Dr. Larry James.  James, a retired Army colonel, was the Chief Psychologist at Guantanamo in 2003, at the height of the abuses at that camp, and then served in the same position at Abu Ghraib during 2004. 

Today, Dr. James circulated an excited email announcing, "with great pride," that he has now been selected to serve on the "White House Task Force entitled Enhancing the Psychological Well-Being of The Military Family."  In his new position, he will be meeting at the White House with Michelle Obama and other White House officials on Tuesday.

For his work at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo, Dr. James was the subject of two formal ethics complaints in the two states where he is licensed to practice: Louisiana and Ohio.  Those complaints -- 50 pages long and full of detailed and well-documented allegations -- were filed by the International Human Rights Clinic of Harvard Law School's Human Rights Program, on behalf of veterans, mental health professionals and others.  The complaints detailed how James "was the senior psychologist of the Guantánamo BSCT, a small but influential group of mental health professionals whose job it was to advise on and participate in the interrogations, and to help create an environment designed to break down prisoners."  Specifically:

During his tenure at the prison, boys and men were threatened with rape and death for themselves and their family members; sexually, culturally, and religiously humiliated; forced naked; deprived of sleep; subjected to sensory deprivation, over-stimulation, and extreme isolation; short-shackled into stress positions for hours; and physically assaulted.

The evidence indicates that abuse of this kind was systemic, that BSCT health professionals played an integral role in its planning and practice. . . .

Writing in 2009, Law Professor Bill Quigley and Deborah Popowski, a Fellow at the Harvard Law School Human Rights Program, described James' role in this particularly notorious incident:

In 2003, Louisiana psychologist and retired Col. Larry James watched behind a one-way mirror in a US prison camp while an interrogator and three prison guards wrestled a screaming, near-naked man on the floor.

The prisoner had been forced into pink women's panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort "to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown." As he recounts in his memoir, "Fixing Hell," Dr. James initially chose not to respond. He "opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason ..."

Although he claims to eventually find "good reason" to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.

James treated numerous detainees who were abused, degraded, and tortured, yet never took any steps to stop or even report these incidents.  Last year, Steven Reisner -- senior faculty member and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, who also teaches at New York University Medical School and Columbia University -- told Democracy Now: "there is a lot of evidence that has been made public showing that the torture programs in the CIA and at Guantánamo, the Department of Defense, were created and overseen by health professionals, particularly psychologists" and that psychologists were at these facilities "to use their professional expertise to break down the detainees." James, argued Dr. Reisner, was directly implicated because:

Larry James was the chief BSCT starting in January 2003. And when you read the standard operating procedures for mental health, for how to -- behavior protocols for detainees during the time that Larry James was the chief psychologist, you find institutionalized abuse and torture -- isolation for thirty days at a time with absolutely no contact, prohibition of the International Committee of the Red Cross to see these detainees, no access even to religious articles, to the Qur’an, unless they cooperate with interrogations, not to mention frequent interrogation.

For his part, Dr. James claims he attempted to protect the detainees under his care from abuse and psychological injury.  Meanwhile, the Louisiana psychology board refused to review the merits of the complaint against James on the grounds that the alleged acts were too old (outside the statute of limitations), while the Ohio board issued a three-sentence, cursory letter which decreed, without any explanation whatsoever, that "it has been determined that we are unable to proceed to formal action in this matter."  So while the charges against him have not been formally sustained by either board, neither have they been evaluated or rejected by any apparent consideration of the merits. Judicial review of the Ohio board's decision is still possible (a Louisiana federal court ruled it lacked jurisdiction to review the board's Statute of Limitations findings).

Despite the overwhelming evidence against him, James should not be deemed guilty in the absence of a formal adjudication.  But the White House's conduct in selecting him is nonetheless baffling, at best.  Of all the psychologists to choose from, why would they possibly choose to honor and elevate the former chief psychologist of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib at the height of the Bush abuses?  More disturbing still, among those most damaged by detainee abuse are the service members forced to participate in it; why would the White House possibly want to put on a task force about the health of military families someone, such as Dr. James, who at the very least is directly associated with policies that so profoundly harmed numerous members of the military and their families?

This isn't exactly a powerful Task Force, but what this appointment does is have the White House -- yet again -- signal that it does not really take very seriously the Bush torture regime.  On appearance grounds alone, the Obama administration should not be embracing and legitimizing the Bush-era Chief Psychologist of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.  Is there really nobody in the White House who was able to come to that realization on their own, or is this part of some twisted "reaching out" effort to show that they view bygones as bygones when it comes to the war crimes our leaders committed and whom the Obama administration continues to protect?  Whatever the explanation, the symbolism here is as ugly as the mindset underlying it.

The Failure to Stand Up to Evil Leads to Insanity, Poverty and the Loss of All Our Rights

Washington's Blog

Preface: I am using the word "evil" in its secular sense in this essay, as in a horrible, destructive act ... religion is beyond the scope of this essay.


When someone fails to stand up to a heinous act, that leads to a whole chain of events.

It Enables More Destructive Acts

Initially, by failing to stand up to the bad act, we are enabling the person who committed it to do bigger and worse things in the future.

Army psychiatrist and Christian philosopher M. Scott Peck wrote extensively on evil in People of the Lie (since Peck was a psychiatrist and an empirical researcher, his investigation of the dynamics of those who commit heinous acts and the subsequent attempts to cover them up is very interesting, even for atheists who will disregard all religious overtones). As Peck wrote:

It is necessary that we first draw the distinction between evil and ordinary sin. It is not their sins per se that characterize evil people...The central defect of the evil is not the sin but the refusal to acknowledge it.

And a longer passage:

We lie only when we are attempting to cover up something we know to be illicit. Some rudimentary form of conscience must precede the act of lying. There is no need to hide unless we first feel that something needs to be hidden. We come now to a sort of paradox. Evil people feel themselves to be perfect. At the same time, however, they have an unacknowledged sense of their own evil nature. Indeed, it is this very sense from which they are frantically trying to flee. The essential component of evil is not the absence of a sense of sin or imperfection but the unwillingness to tolerate that sense. At once and the same time, the evil are aware of their evil and desperately trying to avoid the awareness. Rather than blissfully lacking a sense of morality like the psychopath, they are continually engaged in sweeping the evidence of their evil under the rug of their own consciousness (or attempting to redefine their evil as good). The problem is not a defect of conscience, but the effort to deny the conscience its due. We become evil by attempting to hide from ourselves. The wickedness of the evil is not committed directly, but indirectly as a part of this cover-up process. Evil originates not in the absence of guilt but in the effort to escape it. Since they will do almost anything to avoid the particular pain that comes from self-examination, under ordinary circumstances, the evil are the last people who would ever come to psychotherapy. The evil hate the light – the light of goodness that shows them up, the light of scrutiny that exposes them, the light of the truth that penetrates their deception.

So when people fail to stand up to the heinous acts of a bad person, they are empowering that person's cover up, the very core of their propensity to do further bad acts in the future.
It Destroys Our Ability to Think Rationally
Moreover, failure to stand up to the bad act requires people to rationalize their failure to act, which in turn ends up literally warping their thinking process.
As I've repeatedly pointed out, people will go to extreme lengths to rationalize their failure to recognize bad actions by those in power:

Sociologists from four major research institutions investigated why so many Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, years after it became obvious that Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.

The researchers found, as described in an article in the journal Sociological Inquiry (and re-printed by Newsweek):

• Many Americans felt an urgent need to seek justification for a war already in progress

• Rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.

• "For the most part people completely ignore contrary information."

• "The study demonstrates voters' ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information"

• People get deeply attached to their beliefs, and form emotional attachments that get wrapped up in their personal identity and sense of morality, irrespective of the facts of the matter.

• "We refer to this as 'inferred justification, because for these voters, the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war.

• "People were basically making up justifications for the fact that we were at war"

• "They wanted to believe in the link [between 9/11 and Iraq] because it helped them make sense of a current reality. So voters' ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information, whether we think that is good or bad for democratic practice, does at least demonstrate an impressive form of creativity.

An article ... in Alternet discussing the Sociological Inquiry article helps us to understand that the key to people's active participation in searching for excuses for actions by the big boys is fear:

Subjects were presented during one-on-one interviews with a newspaper clip of this Bush quote: "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al-Qaeda."

The Sept. 11 Commission, too, found no such link, the subjects were told.
"Well, I bet they say that the commission didn't have any proof of it," one subject responded, "but I guess we still can have our opinions and feel that way even though they say that."

Reasoned another: "Saddam, I can't judge if he did what he's being accused of, but if Bush thinks he did it, then he did it."

Others declined to engage the information at all. Most curious to the researchers were the respondents who reasoned that Saddam must have been connected to Sept. 11, because why else would the Bush Administration have gone to war in Iraq?

The desire to believe this was more powerful, according to the researchers, than any active campaign to plant the idea.

Such a campaign did exist in the run-up to the war...

He won't credit [politicians spouting misinformation] alone for the phenomenon, though.

"That kind of puts the idea out there, but what people then do with the idea ... " he said. "Our argument is that people aren't just empty vessels. You don't just sort of open up their brains and dump false information in and they regurgitate it. They're actually active processing cognitive agents"...
The alternate explanation raises queasy questions for the rest of society.

"I think we'd all like to believe that when people come across disconfirming evidence, what they tend to do is to update their opinions," said Andrew Perrin, an associate professor at UNC and another author of the study...

"The implications for how democracy works are quite profound, there's no question in my mind about that," Perrin said. "What it means is that we have to think about the emotional states in which citizens find themselves that then lead them to reason and deliberate in particular ways."

Evidence suggests people are more likely to pay attention to facts within certain emotional states and social situations. Some may never change their minds. For others, policy-makers could better identify those states, for example minimizing the fear that often clouds a person's ability to assess facts ...

The Alternet article links to a must-read interview with psychology professor Sheldon Solomon, who explains:

A large body of evidence shows that momentarily [raising fear of death], typically by asking people to think about themselves dying, intensifies people's strivings to protect and bolster aspects of their worldviews, and to bolster their self-esteem. The most common finding is that [fear of death] increases positive reactions to those who share cherished aspects of one's cultural worldview, and negative reactions toward those who violate cherished cultural values or are merely different.
***
Investors - as with politicians or Americans in general - believe that "when [they] come across disconfirming evidence . . . . they tend to ... update their opinions", but in reality, they cling to the beliefs they formed during certain heightened emotional states, such as fear.

And once people form a belief, it can be almost impossible to get them to change their beliefs ... even if confronted with contradictory information.
As NPR noted last July:

New research suggests that misinformed people rarely change their minds when presented with the facts — and often become even more attached to their beliefs.

***
A new body of research out of the University of Michigan suggests ... that we base our opinions on beliefs and when presented with contradictory facts, we adhere to our original belief even more strongly.

The phenomenon is called backfire, and it plays an especially important role in how we shape and solidify our beliefs on immigration, the president's place of birth, welfare and other highly partisan issues.
***
It's threatening to us to admit that things we believe are wrong. And all of us, liberals and conservatives, you know, have some beliefs that aren't true, and when we find that out, you know, it's threatening to our beliefs and ourselves.
***
This isn't a question of education, necessarily, or sophistication. It's really about, it's really about preserving that belief that we initially held.

Torture as a Quintessential Evil of the Last Decade
A good example of this dynamic is with torture.

Americans were first told by our government that we were not torturing anyone. Then, the government admitted it did a "little" waterboarding, but said that's not torture, and that it was necessary to prevent more Al Qaeda attacks.

The truth, however, is that top experts in interrogation say that:

• Torture doesn't work in providing information which will keep us safe

• Torture actually reduces our national security and creates new terrorists

• Most of those tortured were innocent

• Torture has been used throughout history - not to gain information - but as a form of intimidation, to terrorize people into obedience. In other words, at its core, torture is a form of terrorism.

More importantly, the specific type of torture which was used the the U.S. in Iraq and Guantanamo was tailor-made to extract false confessions.
As I previously pointed out:

Senator Levin revealed that the the U.S. used torture techniques aimed at extracting false confessions.
McClatchy subsequently filled in some of the details:

Former senior U.S. intelligence official familiar with the interrogation issue said that Cheney and former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld demanded that the interrogators find evidence of al Qaida-Iraq collaboration...
For most of 2002 and into 2003, Cheney and Rumsfeld, especially, were also demanding proof of the links between al Qaida and Iraq that (former Iraqi exile leader Ahmed) Chalabi and others had told them were there."It was during this period that CIA interrogators waterboarded two alleged top al Qaida detainees repeatedly — Abu Zubaydah at least 83 times in August 2002 and Khalid Sheik Muhammed 183 times in March 2003 — according to a newly released Justice Department document...

When people kept coming up empty, they were told by Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people to push harder," he continued."Cheney's and Rumsfeld's people were told repeatedly, by CIA . . . and by others, that there wasn't any reliable intelligence that pointed to operational ties between bin Laden and Saddam . . .

A former U.S. Army psychiatrist, Maj. Charles Burney, told Army investigators in 2006 that interrogators at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, detention facility were under "pressure" to produce evidence of ties between al Qaida and Iraq.

"While we were there a large part of the time we were focused on trying to establish a link between al Qaida and Iraq and we were not successful in establishing a link between al Qaida and Iraq," Burney told staff of the Army Inspector General. "The more frustrated people got in not being able to establish that link . . . there was more and more pressure to resort to measures that might produce more immediate results."

"I think it's obvious that the administration was scrambling then to try to find a connection, a link (between al Qaida and Iraq)," [Senator] Levin said in a conference call with reporters. "They made out links where they didn't exist."
Levin recalled Cheney's assertions that a senior Iraqi intelligence officer had met Mohammad Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers, in the Czech Republic capital of Prague just months before the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

The FBI and CIA found that no such meeting occurred.

In other words, top Bush administration officials not only knowingly lied about a non-existent connection between Al Qaida and Iraq, but they pushed and insisted that interrogators use special torture methods aimed at extracting false confessions to attempt to create such a false linkage. See also this and this.

Paul Krugman eloquently summarized the truth about the type of torture used:

Let’s say this slowly: the Bush administration wanted to use 9/11 as a pretext to invade Iraq, even though Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. So it tortured people to make them confess to the nonexistent link.
There’s a word for this: it’s evil.

Indeed, one of the two senior instructors from the Air Force team which taught U.S. servicemen how to resist torture by foreign governments when used to extract false confessions has blown the whistle on the true purpose behind the U.S. torture program.
As Truth Out reported yesterday:

Jessen's notes were provided to Truthout by retired Air Force Capt. Michael Kearns, a "master" SERE instructor and decorated veteran who has previously held high-ranking positions within the Air Force Headquarters Staff and Department of Defense (DoD).

Kearns and his boss, Roger Aldrich, the head of the Air Force Intelligence's Special Survial Training Program (SSTP), based out of Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington, hired Jessen in May 1989. Kearns, who was head of operations at SSTP and trained thousands of service members, said Jessen was brought into the program due to an increase in the number of new SERE courses being taught and "the fact that it required psychological expertise on hand in a full-time basis."

Jessen, then the chief of Psychology Service at the US Air Force Survival School, immediately started to work directly with Kearns on "a new course for special mission units (SMUs), which had as its goal individual resistance to terrorist exploitation."

The course, known as SV-91, was developed for the Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) branch of the US Air Force Intelligence Agency, which acted as the Executive Agent Action Office for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Jessen's notes formed the basis for one part of SV-91, "Psychological Aspects of Detention."

***

Kearns was one of only two officers within DoD qualified to teach all three SERE-related courses within SSTP on a worldwide basis, according to a copy of a 1989 letter written Aldrich, who nominated him officer of the year.

***

The Jessen notes clearly state the totality of what was being reverse-engineered - not just 'enhanced interrogation techniques,' but an entire program of exploitation of prisoners using torture as a central pillar," he said. "What I think is important to note, as an ex-SERE Resistance to Interrogation instructor, is the focus of Jessen's instruction. It is exploitation, not specifically interrogation. And this is not a picayune issue, because if one were to 'reverse-engineer' a course on resistance to exploitation then what one would get is a plan to exploit prisoners, not interrogate them. The CIA/DoD torture program appears to have the same goals as the terrorist organizations or enemy governments for which SV-91 and other SERE courses were created to defend against: the full exploitation of the prisoner in his intelligence, propaganda, or other needs held by the detaining power, such as the recruitment of informers and double agents. Those aspects of the US detainee program have not generally been discussed as part of the torture story in the American press."
***

Jessen wrote that cooperation is the "end goal" of the detainer, who wants the detainee "to see that [the detainer] has 'total' control of you because you are completely dependent on him, and thus you must comply with his wishes. Therefore, it is absolutely inevitable that you must cooperate with him in some way (propaganda, special favors, confession, etc.)."

***

Kearns said, based on what he has read in declassified government documents and news reports about the role SERE played in the Bush administration's torture program, Jessen clearly "reverse-engineered" his lesson plan and used resistance methods to abuse "war on terror" detainees.

So we have the two main Air Force insiders concerning the genesis of the torture program confirming - with original notes - that the whole purpose of the torture program was to extract false confessions.

They Got the False Confessions They Wanted

And false confessions were, in fact, extracted:

The Miami Herald ran a story entitled "Alleged 9/11 mastermind: `I make up stories'", noting:

Accused al Qaeda mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed complained that interrogators tortured lies out of him...

''I make up stories,'' Mohammed said ...

In broken English, he described an interrogation in which he was asked the location of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

''Where is he? I don't know,'' Mohammed said. 'Then he torture me. Then I said, 'Yes, he is in this area or this is al Qaeda which I don't know him.' I said no, they torture me.''

This is not new. It has already been documented that Mohammed confessed to crimes which he could not have committed, and that he said that he gave the interrogators a lot of false information - telling them what he thought they wanted to hear - in an attempt to stop the torture.

Indeed, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed told the Red Cross:

During the harshest period of my interrogation I gave a lot of false information in order to satisfy what I believed the interrogators wished to hear in order to make the ill-treatment stop. I later told the interrogators that their methods were stupid and counterproductive. I'm sure that the false information I was forced to invent in order to make the ill-treatment stop wasted a lot of their time and led to several false red-alerts being placed in the U.S.

And see this Washington Post report.

***
Dick Cheney claimed that waterboarding Khalid Shaikh Mohammed stopped a terror attack on L.A., but as the Chicago Tribune notes:

The Bush administration claimed that the waterboarding of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed helped foil a planned 2002 attack on Los Angeles -- forgetting that he wasn't captured until 2003.

(see this confirmation from the BBC: "Khalid Sheikh Mohammed ... was captured in Pakistan in 2003").

And as I pointed out last year:

[A]ccording to NBC news:

• Much of the 9/11 Commission Report was based upon the testimony of people who were tortured

• At least four of the people whose interrogation figured in the 9/11 Commission Report have claimed that they told interrogators information as a way to stop being "tortured."

• One of the Commission's main sources of information was tortured until he agreed to sign a confession that he was NOT EVEN ALLOWED TO READ

• The 9/11 Commission itself doubted the accuracy of the torture confessions, and yet kept their doubts to themselves

***

Remember, as discussed above, the torture techniques used by the Bush administration to try to link Iraq and 9/11 were specifically geared towards creating false confessions (they were techniques created by the communists to be used in show trials).

***

The above-linked NBC news report quotes a couple of legal experts to this effect:

Michael Ratner, president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, says he is "shocked" that the Commission never asked about extreme interrogation measures.

"If you’re sitting at the 9/11 Commission, with all the high-powered lawyers on the Commission and on the staff, first you ask what happened rather than guess," said Ratner, whose center represents detainees at Guantanamo. "Most people look at the 9/11 Commission Report as a trusted historical document. If their conclusions were supported by information gained from torture, therefore their conclusions are suspect."...

Karen Greenberg, director of the Center for Law and Security at New York University’s School of Law, put it this way: "[I]t should have relied on sources not tainted. It calls into question how we were willing to use these interrogations to construct the narrative."

I also pointed out:

The official 9/11 Commission Report states:

Chapters 5 and 7 rely heavily on information obtained from captured al Qaeda members. A number of these "detainees" have firsthand knowledge of the 9/11 plot. Assessing the truth of statements by these witnesses-sworn enemies of the United States-is challenging. Our access to them has been limited to the review of intelligence reports based on communications received from the locations where the actual interrogations take place. We submitted questions for use in the interrogations, but had no control over whether, when, or how questions of particular interest would be asked. Nor were we allowed to talk to the interrogators so that we could better judge the credibility of the detainees and clarify ambiguities in the reporting.

In other words, the 9/11 Commissioners were not allowed to speak with the detainees, or even their interrogators. Instead, they got their information third-hand.
The Commission didn't really trust the interrogation testimony. For example, one of the primary architects of the 9/11 Commission Report, Ernest May, said in May 2005:

We never had full confidence in the interrogation reports as historical sources.

As I noted last May:

Newsweek is running an essay by [New York Times investigative reporter] Philip Shenon saying [that the 9/11 Commission Report was unreliable because most of the information was based on the statements of tortured detainees]:

The commission appears to have ignored obvious clues throughout 2003 and 2004 that its account of the 9/11 plot and Al Qaeda's history relied heavily on information obtained from detainees who had been subjected to torture, or something not far from it.

The panel raised no public protest over the CIA's interrogation methods, even though news reports at the time suggested how brutal those methods were. In fact, the commission demanded that the CIA carry out new rounds of interrogations in 2004 to get answers to its questions.

That has troubling implications for the credibility of the commission's final report. In intelligence circles, testimony obtained through torture is typically discredited; research shows that people will say anything under threat of intense physical pain.

And yet it is a distinct possibility that Al Qaeda suspects who were the exclusive source of information for long passages of the commission's report may have been subjected to "enhanced" interrogation techniques, or at least threatened with them, because of the 9/11 Commission....

Information from CIA interrogations of two of the three—KSM and Abu Zubaydah—is cited throughout two key chapters of the panel's report focusing on the planning and execution of the attacks and on the history of Al Qaeda.

Footnotes in the panel's report indicate when information was obtained from detainees interrogated by the CIA. An analysis by NBC News found that more than a quarter of the report's footnotes—441 of some 1,700—referred to detainees who were subjected to the CIA's "enhanced" interrogation program, including the trio who were waterboarded.

Commission members note that they repeatedly pressed the Bush White House and CIA for direct access to the detainees, but the administration refused. So the commission forwarded questions to the CIA, whose interrogators posed them on the panel's behalf.
The commission's report gave no hint that harsh interrogation methods were used in gathering information, stating that the panel had "no control" over how the CIA did its job; the authors also said they had attempted to corroborate the information "with documents and statements of others."

But how could the commission corroborate information known only to a handful of people in a shadowy terrorist network, most of whom were either dead or still at large?

Former senator Bob Kerrey of Nebraska, a Democrat on the commission, told me last year he had long feared that the investigation depended too heavily on the accounts of Al Qaeda detainees who were physically coerced into talking. ...

Kerrey said it might take "a permanent 9/11 commission" to end the remaining mysteries of September 11.

This essay will not go too far down the rabbit hole of 9/11.

The point is that the government used a specific set of torture techniques created to extract false confessions which would support a rationale for the Iraq war and the war on terror and which would allow a superficial reading of September 11th itself.

If we fail to stand up to this act of evil - the use of torture to obtain false confessions - we are not only complicit, but we will also eventually drive ourselves crazy in trying to rationalize what was done in our name.

It Disempowers Us and Leads to the Loss of All of Our Rights

As Yves Smith writes today about the Truth Out article:

This revelation raises troubling questions about how programs like this relate to the coarsening of American society. Some readers will no doubt argue that trying to connect the dots between programs designed for use in combat settings and broad social trends is overreaching. Yet look at the themes Jessen stresses: control, dependency, compliance and cooperation. To use one pet example, why are people so apathetic in the wake of widespread abuses by banks, first the extortions that took place during the bailouts, and now the continued flouting of the law in mortgage servicing and foreclosures?
Although there was no single architect like Jessen for the various elements of our current economic paradigm, they do seem to work to weaken, and perhaps in some cases, to break the will of ordinary citizens to stand up to their tormentors large and small. A policy preference for higher levels of unemployment (to keep inflation down and workers in their place) have reduced many if not most individuals’ sense of control of their own destiny and increased their sense of dependence. When job tenures are short and replacement work at the same level of pay can be hard to get, that alone produces a good deal of the sought-after state, compliance.

Add to that an information apparatus which allows employers to see minor transgressions like late payment and misdemeanors such as getting arrested at protests, and you have effective mechanisms for social control. And there are those who look at the abuse of Bradley Manning, which would have seemed inconceivable fifteen years ago, and wonder who else might be deemed to be enough of a threat to merit similar mistreatment.

In other words, the failure to stand up to a heinous act not only destroys our ability to think, but also makes it less likely we will stand up to future bad acts ... thus disempowering us.

That is the road to poverty, and a complete loss of all of our rights ...