Obama's 170 degrees (going on 180) on Torture is a sad and scary spectacle

[OnyxCollie]

118. What 170 degrees? Obama has always "stayed the course."

Obama called on the former general chairman of the RNC to stop Spain's investigation of US torture crimes.

WikiLeaks: How U.S. tried to stop Spain's torture probe
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/12/25/105786/wikileaks-how-us-tried-to-stop.html

MIAMI — It was three months into Barack Obama's presidency, and the administration -- under pressure to do something about alleged abuses in Bush-era interrogation policies -- turned to a Florida senator to deliver a sensitive message to Spain:

Don't indict former President George W. Bush's legal brain trust for alleged torture in the treatment of war on terror detainees, warned Mel Martinez on one of his frequent trips to Madrid. Doing so would chill U.S.-Spanish relations.

US embassy cables: Don't pursue Guantánamo criminal case, says Spanish attorney general
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/202776?INTCMP=SRCH

6. (C) As reported in SEPTEL, Senator Mel Martinez, accompanied by the Charge d'Affaires, met Acting FM Angel Lossada during a visit to the Spanish MFA on April 15. Martinez and the Charge underscored that the prosecutions would not be understood or accepted in the U.S. and would have an enormous impact on the bilateral relationship. The Senator also asked if the GOS had thoroughly considered the source of the material on which the allegations were based to ensure the charges were not based on misinformation or factually wrong statements. Lossada responded that the GOS recognized all of the complications presented by universal jurisdiction, but that the independence of the judiciary and the process must be respected. The GOS would use all appropriate legal tools in the matter. While it did not have much margin to operate, the GOS would advise Conde Pumpido that the official administration position was that the GOS was "not in accord with the National Court." Lossada reiterated to Martinez that the executive branch of government could not close any judicial investigation and urged that this case not affect the overall relationship, adding that our interests were much broader, and that the universal jurisdiction case should not be viewed as a reflection of the GOS position.

Judd Gregg, Obama's Republican nominee for Commerce secretary, didn't like the investigations either.

US embassy cables: Don't pursue Guantánamo criminal case, says Spanish attorney general
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/202776?INTCMP=SRCH

4. (C) As reported in REF A, Senator Judd Gregg, accompanied by the Charge d'Affaires, raised the issue with Luis Felipe Fernandez de la Pena, Director General Policy Director for North America and Europe during a visit to the Spanish MFA on April 13. Senator Gregg expressed his concern about the case. Fernandez de la Pena lamented this development, adding that judicial independence notwithstanding, the MFA disagreed with efforts to apply universal jurisdiction in such cases.

Why the aversion? To protect Bushco, of course!

US embassy cables: Spanish prosecutor weighs Guantánamo criminal case against US officials
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/us-embassy-cables-documents/200177

The fact that this complaint targets former Administration legal officials may reflect a "stepping-stone" strategy designed to pave the way for complaints against even more senior officials.

Eric Holder got the message.

Holder Says He Will Not Permit the Criminalization of Policy Differences
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/story?id=7410267&page=1

As lawmakers call for hearings and debate brews over forming commissions to examine the Bush administration's policies on harsh interrogation techniques, Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed to a House panel that intelligence officials who relied on legal advice from the Bush-era Justice Department would not be prosecuted.

"Those intelligence community officials who acted reasonably and in good faith and in reliance on Department of Justice opinions are not going to be prosecuted," he told members of a House Appropriations Subcommittee, reaffirming the White House sentiment. "It would not be fair, in my view, to bring such prosecutions."

Holder: Won't criminalize terror policy disputes
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/feedarticle/8470942

Associated Press Writer= WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorney General Eric Holder left open the possibility Thursday to prosecuting former Bush administration officials but ruled out filing charges merely over disagreements about policy.

"I will not permit the criminalization of policy differences," Holder testified before a House Appropriations subcommittee.

"However, it is my responsibility as attorney general to enforce the law. It is my duty to enforce the law. If I see evidence of wrongdoing I will pursue it to the full extent of the law," he said.

~snip~

"It is certainly the intention of this administration not to play hide and seek, or not to release certain things," said Holder. "It is not our intention to try to advance a political agenda or to try to hide things from the American people."

CIA Exhales: 99 Out of 101 Torture Cases Dropped
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/06/cia-exhales-99-out-of-101-torture-cases-dropped/

This is how one of the darkest chapters in U.S. counterterrorism ends: with practically every instance of suspected CIA torture dodging criminal scrutiny. It’s one of the greatest gifts the Justice Department could have given the CIA as David Petraeus takes over the agency.

Over two years after Attorney General Eric Holder instructed a special prosecutor, John Durham, to “preliminar(ily) review” whether CIA interrogators unlawfully tortured detainees in their custody, Holder announced on Thursday afternoon that he’ll pursue criminal investigations in precisely two out of 101 cases of suspected detainee abuse. Some of them turned out not to have involved CIA officials after all. Both of the cases that move on to a criminal phase involved the “death in custody” of detainees, Holder said.

But just because there’s a further criminal inquiry doesn’t necessarily mean there will be any charges brought against CIA officials involved in those deaths. If Holder’s decision on Thursday doesn’t actually end the Justice Department’s review of torture in CIA facilities, it brings it awfully close, as outgoing CIA Director Leon Panetta noted.

“On this, my last day as Director, I welcome the news that the broader inquiries are behind us,” Panetta wrote to the CIA staff on Thursday. “We are now finally about to close this chapter of our Agency’s history.”

No Charges Filed on Harsh Tactics Used by the C.I.A.
By SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/31/us/holder-rules-out-prosecutions-in-cia-interrogations.html

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. announced Thursday that no one would be prosecuted for the deaths of a prisoner in Afghanistan in 2002 and another in Iraq in 2003, eliminating the last possibility that any criminal charges will be brought as a result of the brutal interrogations carried out by the C.I.A.

Mr. Holder had already ruled out any charges related to the use of waterboarding and other methods that most human rights experts consider to be torture. His announcement closes a contentious three-year investigation by the Justice Department and brings to an end years of dispute over whether line intelligence or military personnel or their superiors would be held accountable for the abuse of prisoners in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The closing of the two cases means that the Obama administration’s limited effort to scrutinize the counterterrorism programs carried out under President George W. Bush has come to an end. Without elaborating, Mr. Holder suggested that the end of the criminal investigation should not be seen as a moral exoneration of those involved in the prisoners’ treatment and deaths.

“Based on the fully developed factual record concerning the two deaths, the department has declined prosecution because the admissible evidence would not be sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction beyond a reasonable doubt,” his statement said. It said the investigation “was not intended to, and does not resolve, broader questions regarding the propriety of the examined conduct.”

How MI5 colluded in my torture: Binyam Mohamed claims British agents fed Moroccan torturers their questions - WORLD EXCLUSIVE
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1160238/How-MI5-colluded-torture-Binyam-Mohamed-claims-British-agents-fed-Moroccan-torturers-questions--WORLD-EXCLUSIVE.html#ixzz256BI1FmS

Documents obtained by this newspaper - which were disclosed to Mohamed through a court case he filed in America - show that months after he was taken to Morocco aboard an illegal 'extraordinary rendition' flight by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, MI5 twice gave the CIA details of questions they wanted his interrogators to put to him, together with dossiers of photographs.

At the time, in November 2002, Mohamed was being subject to intense, regular beatings and sessions in which his chief Moroccan torturer, a man he knew as Marwan, slashed his chest and genitals with a scalpel.

~snip~

The revelations will put Foreign Secretary David Miliband under even greater pressure to come clean about British involvement in the rendition and alleged torture of Muslim terror suspects.

Last month his lawyers persuaded the High Court not to allow parts of a judgement that summarised Mohamed's treatment to be published, on the grounds that to do so would jeopardise Britian’s intelligence-sharing relationship with America.

Libya/US: Investigate Death of Former CIA Prisoner
http://www.hrw.org/news/2009/05/11/libyaus-investigate-death-former-cia-prisoner

(New York) – The Libyan authorities should carry out a full and transparent investigation of the reported suicide of the Libyan prisoner Ali Mohamed al-Fakheri, also known as Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, Human Rights Watch said today. Al-Libi, who was held in secret US and Egyptian detention from late 2001 to at least 2005, was found dead in his cell in Abu Salim prison in Tripoli. Human Rights Watch spoke with him briefly in the Tripoli prison on April 27, though he refused to be interviewed.

After his arrest in Pakistan in late 2001, al-Libi was sent by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to Egypt in 2002, under the procedure known as “rendition.” According to a CIA declassified cable and a US Senate report, he was tortured in Egypt and gave false information about a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda that Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, used in his speech to the UN Security Council on the planned war with Iraq. Al-Libi was later held by the CIA in a series of secret prisons in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

~snip~

Al-Libi was returned from US custody to Libya in late 2005 or early 2006 and was detained at Abu Salim prison. The Abu Salim prison authorities told Human Rights Watch in April 2009 that he had been sentenced to life imprisonment by the State Security Court, a court whose trial proceedings fail to conform to international fair trial standards.

Human Rights Watch briefly met with al-Libi on April 27 during a research mission to Libya. He refused to be interviewed, and would say nothing more than: “Where were you when I was being tortured in American jails.” Human Rights Watch has strongly condemned the CIA’s detention program and documented how detainees in CIA custody were abused, but, like other human rights groups, was never granted access to prisoners in CIA custody.

At Guantanamo, a Prison Within a Prison
CIA Has Run a Secret Facility for Some Al Qaeda Detainees, Officials Say
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A5918-2004Dec16.html

Within the heavily guarded perimeters of the Defense Department's much-discussed Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, the CIA has maintained a detention facility for valuable al Qaeda captives that has never been mentioned in public, according to military officials and several current and former intelligence officers.

~snip~

Most international terrorism suspects in U.S. custody are held not by the CIA but by the Defense Department at the Guantanamo Bay prison. They are guaranteed access to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and, as a result of a U.S. Supreme Court ruling this year, have the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal courts.

CIA detainees, by contrast, are held under separate rules and far greater secrecy. Under a presidential directive and authorities approved by administration lawyers, the CIA is allowed to capture and hold certain classes of suspects without accounting for them in any public way and without revealing the rules for their treatment. The roster of CIA prisoners is not public, but current and former U.S. intelligence officials say the agency holds the most valuable al Qaeda leaders and many mid-level members with knowledge of the group's logistics, financing and regional operations.

CIA Office of Inspector General report
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/documents/cia_oig_report.pdf

[IMG][/IMG]
p. 15

One of youngest Guantánamo prisoner released
http://www.muslimnews.co.uk/paper/index.php?article=4282

Nineteen-year-old Mohamed Jawad has set foot in Afghanistan after seven years in detention making him one of the youngest prisoners to be released from Guantánamo. He is set to sue the US Government in the next couple of months for inhumane treatment and torture in addition to being a minor in detention.

~snip~

Jawad claims his captors tortured him and other prisoners, deprived them of food and sleep. He has described having his hands tied behind his back and being forced to eat by bending over and putting his mouth into a plate of food. He received substantial abuse, including the ‘frequent flier’ treatment which is a form of torture where the victim is shifted from cell to cell. Mohamed was shifted through 152 locations in a week’s time, staying a maximum of 2 hours and 55 seconds in each location.

Government Seeks To Continue Detaining Mohammed Jawad At Guantánamo Despite Lack Of Evidence
http://www.aclu.org/national-security/government-seeks-continue-detaining-mohammed-jawad-guantanamo-despite-lack-evidenc

NEW YORK – After admitting to a federal judge that Guantánamo detainee and American Civil Liberties Union client Mohammed Jawad had been tortured and illegally detained for nearly seven years, the Obama administration today asked the court for permission to continue to detain Jawad while it decides whether to bring a criminal case against him. The request, filed in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, comes after U.S. District Court Judge Ellen S. Huvelle berated government lawyers last week for their inadequate case against Jawad.

Last fall, a military judge in Jawad's Guantánamo military commission proceeding threw out the bulk of the evidence against him finding that it was obtained through torture. Despite that ruling, the Obama administration continued to rely on those same statements in Jawad's habeas corpus challenge before Judge Huvelle until last week when it said it would no longer rely on that evidence. The Afghan Attorney General recently sent a letter to the U.S. government demanding Jawad's return and suggesting he was as young as 12 when he was captured in Afghanistan and illegally rendered from that country nearly seven years ago.

Following his 2002 arrest in Afghanistan for allegedly throwing a grenade at two U.S. soldiers and their interpreter, Jawad was subjected to repeated torture and other mistreatment and to a systematic program of harsh and highly coercive interrogations designed to break him physically and mentally. Jawad tried to commit suicide in his cell by slamming his head repeatedly against the wall.

CIA Office of Inspector General report
http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/nation/documents/cia_oig_report.pdf

[IMG][/IMG]
p. 42.

"He Was The Agency": Ex-CIA Analyst Questions Brennan Claim He Couldn’t Stop Waterboarding, Torture
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/8/he_was_the_agency_ex_cia#transcript

AMY GOODMAN: That was CIA Director-designate John Brennan being questioned yesterday during his Senate confirmation hearing by Democratic Senator Carl Levin of Michigan.

For more, we’re joined by Melvin Goodman, former CIA and State Department analyst, senior fellow at the Center for International Policy, director of the Center’s National Security Project, his latest book, National Insecurity: The Cost of American Militarism.

Your response to that line of questioning, Mel Goodman?

MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, I think it was very disturbing on a lot of levels. It’s a step backward, for one thing. Former Director Leon Panetta did define waterboarding as torture. The attorney general has defined waterboarding as torture. But John Brennan won’t do so. And also, when John Brennan was a deputy executive assistant to Buzzy Krongard and to George Tenet, remember, he was the cheerleader for some of these onerous policies, particularly renditions and extraordinary renditions. So, for John Brennan today to say he read the Senate committee intelligence report on torture and he learned things he never knew before and that he was shocked with what he learned, this is a case of incredible willful ignorance. He’s been at the top of the CIA and now at the top in the White House—in fact, he’s probably stepping down in becoming the director of the CIA. He has written the manual for targeted killings. He’s written the disposition matrix, which is something out of George Orwell, that allows the president of the United States to pick targets based on evidence that Brennan collects from the CIA, presumably the same kind of evidence that was taken to the country in 2002 and 2003 that allowed the United States to go to war. So, all of this is extremely disturbing about who Brennan is.

JOHN BRENNAN: I did not take steps to stop the CIA’s use of those techniques. I was not in the chain of command of that program. I served as deputy executive director at the time. I had responsibility for overseeing the management of the agency in all of its various functions. And I was aware of the program. I was cc’d on some of those documents. But I had no oversight of it. I wasn’t involved in its creation. I had expressed my personal objections and views to my—some agency colleagues about certain of those EITs, such as waterboarding, nudity and others, where I professed my personal objections to it. But I did not try to stop it, because it was, you know, something that was being done in a different part of the agency under the authority of others, and it was something that was directed by the administration at the time.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Mel Goodman, your response to his answer?

MELVIN GOODMAN: Well, very disturbing for him to say he was in a different part of the agency. He was the agency. He was on the seventh floor of the agency. He was an executive assistant to the director and to the executive secretary of the CIA. He was the one they allowed to go on Sunday morning talk shows to defend renditions, and particularly extraordinary renditions, which involve not only kidnapping people off the streets of Europe and the Middle East and Africa, but sending them to countries where we knew these people would be tortured.

Globalizing Torture: Ahead of Brennan Hearing, International Complicity in CIA Rendition Exposed
http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/7/globalizing_torture_ahead_of_brennan_hearing#transcript

MARGARET WARNER: So, was Secretary Rice correct today when she called it a vital tool in combating terrorism?

JOHN BRENNAN: I think it’s an absolutely vital tool. I have been intimately familiar now over the past decade with the cases of rendition that the U.S. government has been involved in, and I can say without a doubt that it has been very successful as far as producing intelligence that has saved lives.

MARGARET WARNER: So is it—are you saying, both—in two ways, both in getting terrorists off the streets and also in the interrogation?

JOHN BRENNAN: Yes. The rendition is the practice or the process of rendering somebody from one place to another place. It is moving them. And U.S. government will frequently facilitate that movement from a country to another.

MARGARET WARNER: Why would you not, if this—if you have a suspect who’s a danger to the United States, keep it—keep him in the United States’ custody? Is it because we want another country to do the dirty work?

JOHN BRENNAN: No, I don’t think that’s it at all. Also, I think it’s rather arrogant to think that we’re the only country that respects human rights. I think that we have a lot of assurances from these countries that we hand over terrorists to that they will in fact respect human rights. And there are different ways to gain those assurances. But also, let’s say an individual goes to Egypt, because they’re an Egyptian citizen. And Egyptians then have a longer history in terms of dealing with them, and they have family members and others that they can bring in, in fact, to be part of the whole interrogation process.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was John Brennan speaking to PBS’s Margaret Warner in 2005.

AMY GOODMAN: The report is called "Globalizing Torture." It also identifies 54 foreign governments that aided the United States in these operations. The countries include Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, Australia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Canada, Croatia, Cyprus, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Djibouti, Egypt, Ethiopia, Finland, Gambia, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, Indonesia, Iran, Ireland, Italy, Jordan, Kenya, Libya, Lithuania, Macedonia, Malawi, Malaysia, Mauritania, Morocco, Pakistan, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, Sweden, Syria, Thailand, Turkey, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Uzbekistan, Yemen and Zimbabwe.

One country that’s not listed is India, but the report is making headlines there, too, because, for more, we’re joined now by the report’s author, Amrit Singh. She’s senior legal officer at the National Security and Counterterrorism program at the Open Society Justice Initiative. The full name of her new report is "Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition." She’s co-author with Jameel Jaffer of the book Administration of Torture: A Documentary Record from Washington to Abu Ghraib and Beyond_. And interestingly, the new torture report has become news in India. The human-rights-secret-detention-amrit-singh">headline in The Times of India reads, quote: "Prime Minister’s Daughter Blows Whistle on 54 Nations that Helped U.S. Detention Programme." Another website headline, their story: "PM’s Daughter Takes on CIA over Torture." That’s right, our guest, Amrit Singh, is the daughter of India’s prime minister, Manmohan Singh.

Amrit Singh, welcome to Democracy Now!

AMRIT SINGH: Thank you.

AMY GOODMAN: Let’s talk about John Brennan first. He goes to Capitol Hill today for his confirmation hearing. You wrote a piece in the Los Angeles Times. What do you think he should be asked? What do you think of the nomination of John Brennan to be head of the CIA?

AMRIT SINGH: Well, I think John Brennan should be asked what he meant when he said that he was intimately familiar with cases of rendition and that rendition is an absolutely vital tool in combating terrorism, because by the time Brennan made that statement in December of 2005, a number of people had been rendered to foreign governments where they were tortured. By December of 2005, Ahmed Agiza and Muhammad al-Zery had been rendered to Egypt and subjected to electric shock. By December of 2005, Maher Arar, a Canadian national, had been rendered to Syria and subjected to being locked up in a tiny grave-like cell and beaten with cables. By December 2005, a number of other individuals, including Khalid El-Masri, had been rendered. Khalid El-Masri was captured and kidnapped in Macedonia and transferred to Afghanistan and abused. A recent court decision by the European Court of Human Rights found that Khalid El-Masri’s treatment by the CIA amounted to torture. So I think that John Brennan has a lot of explaining to do as to what exactly he meant.

Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition
http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/globalizing-torture-cia-secret-detention-and-extraordinary-rendition

Justice Department Will Not Punish Yoo and Bybee Because Most Lawyers Are Scum Anyway
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2010/02/justice-department-will-not-punish-yoo.html

To show misconduct, according to the standard that Margolis finds most relevant, one would have to show that Yoo or Bybee intentionally made arguments that they knew were wrong and false or did so not caring whether they were wrong or false. That standard could not be met for Jay Bybee, because Bybee was, to put it bluntly, an empty suit who relied on the advice of others and didn't analyze the memos all that closely. He just signed the papers. This makes him pathetic, but not, in Margolis's view, someone who unambiguously violated existing rules of professional responsibility.

As for John Yoo, Margolis explains (although he puts it far more diplomatically) that Yoo was an ideologue who entered government service with a warped vision of the world in which he sincerely believed. Yoo had crazy ideas even before he entered government; which strongly suggests that he probably shouldn't have been hired in the first place. Therefore it is hard to conclude that Yoo deliberately gave advice that he knew was wrong to the CIA. Yoo isn't putting people on when he says the absurd things he says in these memos and elsewhere. He actually believes that the President is a dictator and that the President doesn't have to obey statutes that make torture a crime. He actually believes that you should read the torture statute so narrowly that it lets the CIA torture people. John Yoo used every trick in the book to twist the law because he actually believes in a law that is twisted. And Margolis points out that other department lawyers, who, presumably, did have properly functioning consciences and were not seriously incompetent, looked at the torture memos and told Bybee that, on the whole, in the context of the limited audience for the memos, and putting aside their most ridiculous claims, the torture memos made defensible legal arguments of the kind that lawyers sometimes make on behalf of their clients. It is important to understand that Margolis reached this conclusion not because Yoo's arguments were just or sensible, or even plausible, but because lawyers can make really really crazy arguments and still avoid professional sanction. This is less a defense of Yoo than an indictment of the doctrines of professional responsibility.

Margolis concludes (p. 67), perhaps more in sorrow than in anger, that Yoo did not intentionally give incorrect legal advice, although, Margolis admits that "{i}t is a close question." He notes that "OPR's findings and my decision are less important than the public's ability to make its own judgments about these documents and learn lessons for the future." Margolis' last point is especially important, since the former Vice-President of the United States is now going around the country telling people that he supports waterboarding and actively sought to use it when he was in office. Put differently, there is at least one member of the previous Administration walking around that is an admitted war criminal, although, to be sure, confessing to the elements of a war crime on television apparently does not, at least in this country, lead to any serious danger that one will actually be prosecuted for such crimes.