Psyche, Science, and Society

Fake evidence used in GTMO trials?

The AP reports claims that the government is actually using fabricated “evidence” in Guantanamo trials. This is in addition to using likely torture-extracted “evidence” from the team that murdered Dilawar and Habibullah at Bagram, subject of Taxi to the Dark Side:

US accused of altering Gitmo evidence
Lawyers for Canadian Terror Suspect Say US Military Commander Altered Evidence

by MICHAEL MELIA

A U.S. military commander altered a report on a firefight in Afghanistan to cast blame for the death of a Delta Force commando on a Canadian youth who was captured after the shooting stopped, a defense attorney said Thursday.

The attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, made the allegation at a pretrial hearing as he argued for access to the officer, identified only as “Col. W,” as well as details about interrogations that he said might help clear his client of war-crimes charges.

The U.S. military has charged Omar Khadr with murder for throwing a grenade that killed Sgt. 1st Class Christopher Speer during a U.S. military raid on July 27, 2002, on an al-Qaida compound in eastern Afghanistan. Khadr’s case is on track to be the first to go to trial under a military tribunal system at this U.S. Navy base in southeast Cuba.

The military commander’s official report the day after the raid originally said the assailant who threw the grenade was killed, which would rule out Khadr as the suspect. But the report was revised months later, under the same date, to say a U.S. fighter had only “engaged” the assailant, according to Kuebler, who said the later version was presented to him by prosecutors as an “updated” document.

Kuebler told reporters after the hearing that it appears “the government manufactured evidence to make it look like Omar was guilty.”

Prosecutors did not contest Kuebler’s account in court and did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Khadr, who was captured when he was 15, is among roughly 80 detainees the Pentagon plans to prosecute at Guantanamo. So far, roughly a dozen of the 275 men held at Guantanamo have been charged with war crimes.

Kuebler said the trial will likely hinge on statements that Khadr made to interrogators when he was held at a military prison at Bagram air base in Afghanistan. The attorney asked to be provided with the names of the interrogators as well as what techniques they used.

His interrogators included members of a unit implicated in the December 2002 beating deaths of two Afghan detainees, named Dilawar and Habibullah, Kuebler said.

The lead prosecutor, Marine Corps Maj. Jeffrey Groharing, said defense lawyers have not demonstrated that speaking with individual interrogators would benefit their case. He said the government already has provided typewritten summaries of the Bagram interrogations.

Kuebler bristled at the prosecutor’s decision to withhold information it does not consider relevant to the case.

“What does he know about our case … and what might help us prepare for trial?” he asked.

The judge, Army Col. Peter Brownback, scolded both sides for not cooperating more closely on evidence-related issues that could delay the trial, currently scheduled for May. He said he would rule on most of the defense motions by late Friday.

Brownback also ordered prosecutors to provide the defense with official correspondence regarding the case between the U.S. and Canadian governments.

Add comment March 13th, 2008

Dan Sullivan: Justifying torture: America’s other favorite pastime

Daniel Sullivan, a senior at the University of Arizona raises interesting arguments against torture, taking the pro-torture arguments seriously and turns them on their back. He also quotes my friend Jean Maria Arrigo to boot:

Justifying torture: America’s other favorite pastime
by Dan Sullivan

I’m mad as hell, and I’m not gonna take it anymore.

Why do we have to live in a country that actually debates the merits of institutionalized torture?

President George W. Bush vetoed a bill Saturday which would have restricted the CIA to using only those interrogation techniques specified by the U.S. Army field manual of interrogation. The manual complies with the Geneva Convention’s regulations for respecting prisoners’ rights, and the FBI condemns harsher techniques as ineffective and unnecessary. Yet Mr. Bush justified his veto, claiming that restricting the CIA to these methods would endanger U.S. citizens by denying our protectors the “tools they need” to fight terrorism.

Those who support interrogators resorting to tactics like threatening death by drowning (used on the “9/11 mastermind” Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) contend that this is permissible when circumstances demand weighing a suspect’s rights against those of many innocents who could be saved by revealed information.

But many would argue that it’s shameful to live in a country that does not do everything in its power to eradicate torture on categorical moral grounds. We might claim that torture is not justifiable under any circumstances because of the sanctity of human life.

Ironically, this categorical moral argument is strikingly similar to the one Mr. Bush and his supporters tend to rely on when condemning abortion. Our president wants to have his human cake and torture it too - apparently we should not consider extenuating circumstances and the rights of others (mothers, siblings) where abortion is concerned because of the supreme sanctity of human life, but when it comes to suspects under interrogation, vague predictions of possible threat to innocents are enough to take them skinny dipping the hard way.

But let us assume - like good post-Kantians - that there are no hard and fast moral categories we can rely on to solve every dilemma.

Let’s take the “ticking time bomb” argument seriously, conceding that torturing someone possessing information that, if found speedily, could spare thousands is an acceptable violation of human rights.

The mere formation of this hypothetical is just the first step toward justifying institutionalized torture. If we’re willing to make allowances for the occasional overriding of human rights - and to be subjected to the contempt of the international community for Guantanamo Bay - we better be goddamn drowning ourselves in empirical evidence of instances where torture has prevented atrocities.

What do we have instead? Mr. Bush’s assurance (reported in The New York Times on Sunday) that “were it not for (the CIA’s interrogation program), our intelligence community believes that al-Qaida and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland,” a claim that was directly refuted by Sen. John D. Rockefeller, chairman of the Intelligence Committee.

Comb the Internet and books on the subject for historical examples in which use of torture has indisputably led to the prevention of many civilian deaths. I haven’t found a single one.

Eleven-year-old Jakob von Metzer’s kidnapper was threatened with torture by German police in 2002; he told his interrogator where the boy was, but Jakob was already dead. In the 1977 European Court of Human Rights case Ireland v. United Kingdom, the U.K. could point to only two examples in which torture of Irish Republican Army operatives produced actionable intelligence (these were disputed, and Britain lost the case; type in “torture justified” at www.pbs.org for more information).

Much of the evidence actually comes out against torture as effective. Forensic psychologists have found that harsh interrogation generally does nothing but increase the amount of false information given (see Gisli Gudjonsson’s “The Psychology of Interrogations and Confessions”). And as Vittorio Bufacchi and Jean Maria Arrigo opined in the August 2006 issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy, using torture leads to the development of better countertorture resistance strategies by the enemy, which in turn call for new torture methods. Similar to a current biomedicinal problem, torture keeps us in a counterproductive “arms race” just as we scramble to find new cures for bacterial and viral strains that have evolved resistance to our drugs.

In short, as Tolstoy once said of Nietzsche, torture is both “stupid and abnormal” (and immoral). There are better and more humane ways of procuring information from suspects, as Israeli interrogators have determined since Israel’s 1999 ban on torture. Let’s follow our allies’ lead and hold off on torture, at least until there is better evidence for its case.

Daniel Sullivan is a senior majoring in German studies and psychology. He can be reached at letters@wildcat.arizona.edu.

Add comment March 13th, 2008

Playmobil Security Check Point

The Total Surveillance State comes to a child near you:

Playmobil Security Check Point

Add comment March 13th, 2008

Taxi to the Dark Side

Academy award winning Taxi to the Dark Side is now available from Google video:

Add comment March 13th, 2008

Geraldine Ferraro when racism had no political utility

Geraldine Ferraro expressed quite different sentiments to the New York Times before she was a hack for Hilary Clinton:

“All evidence is that a white female has an advantage over a black male — for reasons of our cultural heritage,” said the Rev. Jesse L. Jackson, the civil rights leader who ran for president in 1984 and 1988. Still, he said, for African-American and female candidates, “It’s easier — emphatically so.”

Ms. Ferraro offered a similar sentiment. “I think it’s more realistic for a woman than it is for an African-American,” said Ms. Ferraro. “There is a certain amount of racism that exists in the United States — whether it’s conscious or not it’s true.”

“Women are 51 percent of the population,” she added.

[h/t TalkingPointsMemo.]

Keith Olberman Special Comment on the Clinton campaign:

1 comment March 13th, 2008

Washington Monthly: No Torture. No Exceptions.

The Washington Monthly has a moving set of essays by politicians, former military and intelligence officers, and former diplomats expressing their collective disgust with the Bush torture policy. The entire set is available as a pdf here. Here is the introduction:

NO MORE
No Torture. No Exceptions.

In most issues of the Washington Monthly, we favor articles that we hope will launch a debate. In this issue we seek to end one. The unifying message of the articles that follow is, simply, Stop. In the wake of September 11, the United States became a nation that practiced torture.

Astonishingly—despite the repudiation of torture by experts and the revelations of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib—we remain one. As we go to press, President George W. Bush stands poised to veto a measure that would end all use of torture by the United States. His move, we suspect, will provoke only limited outcry. What once was shocking is now ordinary.

 On paper, the list of practices declared legal by the Department of Justice for use on detainees in Guantanamo Bay and other locations has a somewhat bloodless quality—sleep deprivation, stress positions, forced standing, sensory deprivation, nudity, extremes of heat or cold. But such bland terms mask great suffering. Sleep deprivation eventually leads to hallucinations and psychosis. (Menachem Begin, former prime minister of Israel, experienced sleep deprivation at the hands of the KGB and would later assert that “anyone who has experienced this desire [to sleep] knows that not even hunger and thirst are comparable with it.”) Stress positions entail ordeals such as being shackled by the wrists, suspended from the ceiling, with arms spread out and feet barely touching the ground. Forced standing, a technique often used in North Korean prisons, involves remaining erect and completely still, producing an excruciating combination of physical and psychological pain, as ankles swell, blisters erupt on the skin, and, in time, kidneys break down. Sensory deprivation—being deprived of sight, sound, and touch—can produce psychotic symptoms in as little as twenty-four hours. The agony of severe and prolonged exposure to temperature extremes and the humiliation of forced nudity speak for themselves.

Then there is waterboarding, a form of mock execution by drowning, a technique that has been used in so-called “black sites.” In addition to the physical pain and terror it induces, long-term psychological effects also haunt patients—panic attacks, depression, and symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder. It has long been prosecuted as a crime of war. In our view, it still should be.

 Ideally, the election in November would put an end to this debate, but we fear it won’t. John McCain, who for so long was one of the leading Republican opponents of the White House’s policy on torture, voted in February against making the CIA subject to the ban on “enhanced interrogation.” As for Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, while both have come out strongly against torture, they seldom discuss the subject on the campaign trail. We fear that even a Democratic president might, under pressure from elements of the national security bureaucracy, carve out loopholes, possibly in secret, condoning some forms of torture.

 Over the past decade, voters have had many legitimate worries: stagnant wages, corruption in Washington, terrorism, and a botched war in Iraq. But we believe that when Americans look back years from now, what will shame us most is that our country abandoned a bedrock principle of civilized nations: that torture is without exception wrong.

 It is in the hopes of keeping the attention of the public, and that of our elected officials, on this subject that the writers of this collection of essays have put pen to paper. They include a former president, the speaker of the House, two former White House chiefs of staff, current and former senators, generals, admirals, intelligence officials, interrogators, and religious leaders. Some are Republicans, others are Democrats, and still others are neither. What they all agree on, however, is this: It was a profound moral and strategic mistake for the United States to abandon long-standing policies of humane treatment of enemy captives. We should return to the rule of law and cease all forms of torture, with no exceptions for any agency. And we should expect our presidential nominees to commit to this idea. —The Editors

 The Washington Monthly thanks the American Security Project for its assistance in coordinating this project.

[h/t Truthout and the person who sent this link to me. Thanks!]

Add comment March 13th, 2008