Psyche, Science, and Society

Watch: Torturing Democracy

Torturing Democracy, perhaps the best documentary on US torture made so far, is now available for embedding. This is the film that was “censored” by NPR. They were unable to find any room in the schedule for it until Jan 21, 2009! Fortunately, many local NPR stations, but not the one in Washington DC, have showed it. If you haven’t seen it, watch it here:

1 comment December 26th, 2008

Documentary: Why We Fight

Eugene Jarecki’s Why 2005 We Fight:

We need a concerted effort to defeat the military-industrial-Congressional complex, for the good of us all.

December 26th, 2008

More on the mass grave destruction in Afghanistan

The Times (London) has more on the attempted destruction of a mass grave in Afghanistan containing evidence of war crimes committed in 2001:

Mass grave plundered at site of Taleban prisoners’ massacre

By Tom Coghlan in Kabul

The Afghan Government has called on Nato troops to guard an alleged war crimes site that has been plundered and as many as 2,000 bodies apparently removed.

The mass grave at Dasht-e-Leili in northern Afghanistan is thought to contain the remains of between 1,000 and 2,000 Taleban prisoners massacred by fighters loyal to the Uzbek warlord General Abdul Rashid Dostum in November 2001. The killings occurred in the remote Leili desert as General Dostum’s forces fought alongside US special forces.

Prisoners were packed into sealed shipping containers and left to suffocate. Others are alleged to have died when fighters riddled other containers full of prisoners with bullets before burning and burying the bodies.

A State Department intelligence assessment from November 23, 2002, released recently under freedom of information laws, assessed that up to 2,000 Taleban prisoners died in the incident, despite initial claims from the US Government that the number was in the dozens. The mass grave site is a forbidding and desolate spot in an area notorious for bandits and thieve

Human rights organisations confirm that five large pits have appeared recently at the site, with two measuring about 15m (50ft) by 30m, and that earth movers have been operating, digging to a depth of 3m.

“We have evidence that significant removal of evidence has taken place,” said Nathaniel Raymond, a senior investigator at Physicians for Human Rights, a US-based organisation specialising in mass grave investigations that has been hired by the United Nations to monitor several war crimes sites in Afghanistan.

“We don’t know how much is left. We don’t know how much has been removed. The Afghan Government, the international community and the United States in particular has responsibility to stop actors such as Abdul Rashid Dostum from trampling on international law.”

Farid Mutakhail, head of the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission in the north, said that the digging might have been going on for four or five months. “We found that most of the bones that were excavated from the grave were thrown into the Pul-e-Surkh river,” he said.

Humayun Hamidzada, a spokesman for the Afghan Government, told The Times: “We are aware of the importance of the site and we are in the process of requesting Nato forces to protect the site.”

Nato officials said that they had not received a formal request. There are 84 known mass grave sites in Afghanistan but none has been excavated and few are monitored by the authorities.

Claims that a massacre had taken place at Dasht-e-Leili emerged in 2002. An initial investigation produced 15 bodies from one trench. Post-mortem examinations on three found that the cause of death was suffocation, which was judged to be homicide.

General Dostum, the alleged perpetrator of the massacre, was chief of staff to the Afghan National Army until this year. He retains strong support among the Uzbek population in the north and won 10 per cent of the vote in the 2004 presidential elections.

At the height of his power in the 1990s, Dostum ran his own mini-state in northern Afghanistan, printing his own currency, setting up an airline and travelling in an armoured Cadillac. Faced with the advance of the Taleban he is reported to have vowed never to submit to a government that banned whisky and music.

In February he was suspended from his post and a warrant was issued for his arrest when, backed by 50 gunmen, he broke into the home of a political rival, Akbar Bai, and assaulted him and his family. General Dostum retreated to his palace in Kabul, which also houses his television station.

This month the Turkish press reported that he had gone into exile in Turkey. That was denied last night by Azizullah Kargar, the deputy leader of the general’s Junbish-e-Millie party. “General Dostum was officially invited by the Turkish Foreign Ministry. He went to meet some Turkish officials and to see his family. He will return very soon to Afghanistan,” he said.

A spokesman for the Presidential Palace in Kabul declined to comment.

December 26th, 2008

John Brennan’s role in the CIA chain of command

Blogger Back To Our Senses explores the role of John Brennan in the CIA’s chain of command and suggests that his placement itself raises enough questions, without Brennan’s public statements, on which our Open Letter and other criticism was based. His reasoning seems sober and very interesting. He concludes by joining those supporting a Truth Commission to find out what really happened in detainee abse, and who was behind it:

The broader CIA critique

By Back To Our Senses

In Glenn Greenwald’s recent Salon article, “Some observations after being involved in a Fox News report,” he discusses his attempt to set the record straight when it comes to the left blogs’ John Brennan critique. I believe he is mostly right when he says:

“Specifically, the case against John Brennan as CIA Director – from the beginning – was based almost exclusively on comments he made on television, after he left the CIA, in which he supported rendition and what he called ‘enhanced interrogation tactics.’” [bolding Greenwald's]

That was indeed the basis for the Brennan critique. John Brennan, basically, did this to himself – he was the one who stood up and acted as a mouthpiece for the Bush administration’s tactics. The mass media doesn’t understand this for some reason. Despite the fact that Brennan’s statements are out there for the world to see, the MSM did little to present them to their viewers/readers. But even if Brennan hadn’t put his foot in his mouth, I believe he would’ve been, by virtue of his former place in the chain of command, disqualifed for the CIA Director position.

No blogger I’ve read is demanding a massive purge of CIA staff. But I personally think it is important to both make and accept as legitimate a broader critique of Obama’s CIA candidates based on chain of command.

Mel Goodman did this a little bit regarding John Brennan in his Democracy Now! appearance. From the transcript:

“MEL GOODMAN: OK. John Brennan was deputy executive secretary to George Tenet during the worst violations during the CIA period in the run-up to the Iraq war, so he sat there at Tenet’s knee when they passed judgment on torture and abuse, on extraordinary renditions, on black sites, on secret prisons. He was part of all of that decision making.”

Goodman is right to hold Brennan accountable for decisions made in and by the CIA. Brennan was one of the leaders – as were Steve Kappes and John McLaughlin, both of whom have been floated for the CIA Director position. I don’t think we should punish the lower-level officers in the CIA who carried out specific operations – the Kirakous of the intelligence world. But we do need to ensure that the honchos of the Bush administration’s CIA are held accountable for the decisions they made and that they will not now lead Obama’s CIA.

To construct this critique, we need to understand the chain of command in the CIA (esp. before the 9/11 commission report and the establishment of the DNI position). According to espionageinfo.com :

The “director of Central Intelligence (DCI) oversees the four directorates (Administration, Intelligence, Science and Technology, and Operations), as well as numerous other offices.”

“Under DCI is the deputy director of Central Intelligence (DDCI), who assists DCI as head of the CIA and of the Intelligence Community. DDCI also exercises the powers of the DCI when the holder of that position is absent or disabled. Within the CIA and the Intelligence Community as a whole, the offices of the DCI and the DDCI are intended to function virtually as a single unit.”

The very top. The buck stops with the DCI and the DDCI. In other words, these two guys, both floated as Obama administration CIA Directors, DCI Hayden and DDCI Steve Kappes, are literally in this together.

Continuing from espionageinfo.com:

“By far the largest chain of command within the CIA, however is the one that runs through the offices of the Executive Director (EXDIR) and Deputy Executive Director (D/EXDIR).

The EXDIR oversees five centers that collectively enable the CIA to carry out its mission: the Chief Financial Officer, Chief Information Officer, Global Support, Human Resources, and Security, each of which have numerous subordinate offices and bureaus. Also under the EXDIR aegis are several independent functions,  including the Center for the Study of Intelligence, Office of Equal Employment Opportunity, Ombudsman/Alternative Dispute Resolution, and the Executive Secretary. Finally, the Executive Director’s office is in the line of authority between DCI/DDCI and the four directorates.”

The Wall Street Journal also has a chart that lays out these relationships nicely. Note this chart is not the same as the current CIA chart which takes into account the various reforms made in 2004 and onward.

The EXDIR’s office has authority over Operations. You know, that directorate where particular rendition and interrogation plans are hatched and carried out. And those in charge of Operations are the Deputy Director of Operations and the Associate Deputy Director of Operations. Pertinently, from June 2002 on Kappes was the Associate Deputy Director of Operations (for more on Kappes, please see here).

Considering that John Brennan served as the Deputy Executive Director, his line about not being “involved in the decisionmaking process for any of these controversial policies and actions” is a little weak. Until March 2003 (when he left) he had authority and oversight over Operations. Based on the job description alone he was involved in the implementation of these controversial policies. And I think that is fair game.

Why is it fair game? Because we hold our leaders accountable for their actions. If people are kidnapped, if people are held in black site cells without a clue as to why, if someone is tortured, we look to those leaders for an explanation as to why – and why these things continued.

Based on their positions of authority alone, I find Kappes and McLaughlin unfit to serve in the CIA – and Brennan too. I would find Jim Pavitt, former Deputy Director of Operations until June 2004, unfit as well.

Why is all this important? How about this – a point of Tim Shorrock’s and Frank Naif’s. Their point is in response to the bundles of international legal trouble the CIA’s rendition and interrogation policies have gotten the agency into. To quote Shorrock and Naif:

“Ignoring allied complaints about heavy-handed renditions is not an option–senior career and appointed officials who greenlighted these operations should step forward for the inevitable reckoning on behalf of their country, and on behalf of the brave men and women whose intelligence careers and personal lives have been turned inside out by foreign indictments.”

By virtue of their place in the chain of command, the Brennans and Kappes of the intelligence world need to offer an explanation for how these renditions happened, how they went so wrong, and why they were allowed to happen at all. They will be able to offer either useful testimony or they will themselves be targets of these international investigations. Because whether we think it’s legal or not, other countries have discovered our operations in their territory, and have found them illegal.

In the domestic arena, the logic is similar. As Senator Levin said on the Rachel Maddow Show on Dec 17, 2008:

LEVIN: “What I think is our role to do is to bring out the facts which we have to state our conclusions, which we have, which is where the origin of these techniques began. And then to turn over to the Justice Department of the next administration – because clearly this Justice Department is not willing to take an objective look – to turn over to the next Justice Department all the facts that we can, and we have put together, and get our report, the rest of it declassified.

But then it seems to me it is appropriate that there be an outside commission appointed to take this out of politics, that it would have the clear subpoena authority to get to the parts of this which are not yet clear, and that is the role of the CIA.

We looked at the role of the Department of Defense, but the role of the CIA has not yet been looked at, and let an outside commission reach the kind of conclusions which then may or may not lead to indictments or to civil action. But it is not our role, it’s not appropriate for us to make those kinds of – reach those kinds of conclusions.” [bolding my own]

By virture of their positions alone, we know who had responsibility. Now is the time to find out what happened, from them. Keeping these officials in the CIA is not an option. We need them to take responsibility for the decisions they made, and the policies that we as a nation need to leave behind.

1 comment December 26th, 2008