Psyche, Science, and Society

Two more on NYT refusal to take torture seriously

UPDATE: I inadvertently included only the first page of Charles Kaiser’s article. This has been fixed. I have also added his update article at the end.

Wednesday’s New York Times article — on the problems faced by Obama’s transition team as they deal with the repercussions of the rejection of John Brennan as CIA Director — is coming under increasing attack. It is seen by many as one of the most blatant examples of the Times’ marginalizing and trivializing of torture opponents. I have already posted several pieces on this by Spencer Ackerman and Andrew Sullivan. Here are two more by Scott Horton and Charles Kaiser [in the Columbia Journalism Review].

Scott Horton:

The Gray Lady’s Torture Problem

By Scott Horton

On Wednesday, the New York Times had another psychotic episode. The paper’s editorial page has been an eloquent voice on the national stage regarding torture. But often enough the news it relies upon for its editorials never finds its way into its reporting–and its reporting on the issue is not only consistently left in the dust by its competition (particularly by the Washington Post), but, often enough, is not much more than half-baked gossip. That’s the case with this piece by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane. The story could have grappled with the many subtle and complex policy issues that the incoming administration faces in implementing its no-torture pledge at the CIA. Instead, however, the authors treat us to what sounds suspiciously like an extended pouting session from the camp of John O. Brennan.

Brennan and his friends obviously believe that rejecting him is a slap in the face to all veterans of the war on terror–an absurd proposition that the Times then proceeds to treat as indisputable fact. But the Times’s language is even more revealing. As Andrew Sullivan points out, the Times chokes and sputters and is unable to mouth the word “torture.” As I discovered in studying the paper’s reporting over a period of year, when a neighbor plays his stereo too loudly in the apartment next door, that is “torture.” But when a man is stripped of his clothing, chained to the floor in a short-shackle position, subjected to sleep deprivation and alternating cold and heat, and left to writhe in his own feces and urine—that, in the world of the Times, is just an “enhanced interrogation technique.” Shane and Mazzetti do us one better in this piece. Figures who criticize torture and Brennan’s fitness to be DCI are, we learn, the “left wing of the Democratic Party.” That’s a remarkable characterization for a group that is led by retired generals and admirals, as well as many of the nation’s most prominent religious leaders.

But the most striking thing about the piece is that the authors obviously don’t have a clue about what’s going on inside the Obama transition team. And on that, I extend my congratulations to camp Obama, which is doing a laudable job of keeping its deliberations to itself.

I discuss the piece further with Charles Kaiser at Columbia Journalism Review here.

Update: Senator Feinstein Was Misquoted

But wait: it gets even better. The Times writers were busy yesterday explaining that the key news value of their story was its disclosure that two senators, most notably Californian Diane Feinstein, the incoming chair of the intelligence committee, were backing off the Obama team’s “no torture” pledge. Spencer Ackerman checked the quote attributed to Feinstein in the Times article, and discovered that one key sentence had been hacked off, creating the false impression that Feinstein was opposing the uniform anti-torture approach for which she had voted in the current session. Here’s the text that the Times elided: “my intent is to pass a law that effectively bans torture, complies with all laws and treaties, and provides a single standard across the government.” So when will the Times correct its distorted reporting? And what exactly were Mazzetti and Shane up to with this very bizarre submission?

Charles Kaiser:

Above the Fold: Slanting the Torture Story

Everything you won’t learn about torture in The New York Times
By Charles Kaiser

There is a fierce battle going on over what kind of a CIA director Barack Obama should appoint, when he should close the prison camp at Guantanamo, and whether there should be a full scale investigation (and possible prosecution) of the torture advocates in the Bush administration.

If you’ve only been reading The New York Times, you’re probably aware of these battles—but almost everyone you have seen quoted about them has similar points of view. Most of the Times’s sources don’t think that anyone who formulated or acquiesced in the current administration’s torture policies should be excluded as a candidate for CIA director, or prosecuted for possible violations of criminal law.

The story on the front page of Wednesday morning’s New York Times provides the most recent and the most dramatic example of this syndrome. The story, by Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, noted that John O. Brennan had withdrawn his name from consideration for CIA director after liberal critics attacked his role in the agency’s interrogation program, even though Brennan characterized himself as a “strong opponent” within the agency of harsh interrogation techniques. Brennan’s characterization was not disputed by anyone else in the story, even though most experts on this subject agree that Brennan acquiesced in everything that the CIA did in this area while he served there.

Brennan’s self-defense was followed by a quote from another ex-CIA man, Mark Lowenthal, who claimed that Brennan’s downfall “sent a message that ‘if you worked in the C.I.A. during the war on terror, you are now tainted,’ and had created anxiety in the ranks of the agency’s clandestine service.”

“I was aghast reading this,” said Scott Horton, a professor of human rights law at Hofstra and a contributing editor at Harper’s, whose blog was instrumental in framing the opposition to Brennan’s appointment. “The Times doesn’t even do a reasonable job of presenting the conflicts—their principal source today was John O. Brennan. They have not reached out to the other side. It looks like Mark and Scott have decided that it’s payback time for a couple of their sources at the agency.”

Horton also disputed the idea that an investigation of agency abuses would “would demoralize the line officers of intelligence and the military.” The people saying that are “very very skillfully pointing to the interrogators as being the targets—because they know they would not be the targets. The people who would be the targets are policy makers like [Cheney chief of staff David] Addington, who have the same ability to attract sympathy from the public as cockroaches. I’m not sure that the early part of the story is going to be so embarrassing to the company. There was push back at the beginning; you had pretty high level opposition and Cheney decided to cram it down, which is why they went to get that Department of Justice memo” authorizing the torture of prisoners.

Horton added that people in the CIA say Brennan is “absolutely correct he wasn’t responsible for shaping this policy; but when he suggests he was a vigorous opponent, they laugh.”

Asked by Full Court Press about Horton’s suspicions that the piece he had co-authored was payback for his sources at the CIA, Mark Mazzetti replied, “What am I going to say to that? It’s like absurd.”

The Times piece also framed the debate as a contest between CIA veterans and the “left flank of the Democratic Party.” But the only opponent to the Bush administration’s torture policy quoted in the piece was retired general Paul D. Eaton, who oversaw the training of Iraqi forces for the Army in 2003 and 2004.

Eaton, who is one of a group of forty retired admirals and generals opposed to torture, told the Times, “This administration has set a tone problem for the military. We’ve had eight years of undermining good order and discipline.”

I asked Mazzetti if he thought Eaton and his fellow retired generals and admirals regarded themselves part of the “left flank” of the Democratic Party. The Times reporter replied, “I wouldn’t want to comment on that. I think our piece pretty much stands for itself.”

A veteran human rights advocate in Washington explained the press’s dilemma this way:

The people who are doing the transition aren’t talking to anyone. And the people who are talking don’t really know what’s going on. The reporters are under enormous pressure to write stories; so what they inevitably do is go to these people outside of the circle who are either exaggerating their knowledge to make themselves look important, or are advancing an agenda.

(Scott Horton also observed that another piece in the Times Week on Review last Sunday, about how Americans should think about Guantanamo, relied almost exclusively on quotes from supporters of the current administration.)

The piece on the front page of Wednesday’s Times struck me as so unbalanced, I sent this e-mail to four top editors there: “This morning’s torture story on the front page is 1174 words long, of which 147 words are devoted to the anti-torture position, which the reporters writing the story obviously disagree with. I would like to know on what basis you believe this equation meets traditional New York Times standards for fairness and balance.”

Executive editor Bill Keller replied:

Your e-mail is 67 words long, of which zero are devoted to the substance of the story. The story is not a roundup of the debate over the use of torture. It is about the dilemma facing the Obama administration as it seeks a new head of the C.I.A. and tries to decide what level of association with the recent past might disqualify a candidate. One potential choice to head the agency has already withdrawn his name after coming under attack. Now, the piece reports, “Mr. Obama’s search for someone else and his future relationship with the agency are complicated by the tension between his apparent desire to make a clean break with Bush aministration policies he has condemned and concern about alienating an agency with a central role in the campaign against Al Qaeda.” This is a balancing act Obama has not yet resolved, and the article in no way rescribes how he should resolve it…It’s a little unfair to criticize an article for not being some altogether different article you might have written.

Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet told me, “Your take is sort of ridiculous. Your’re reading a point of view on the part of the reporters that is not there. You should read their past stories before jumping to conclusions.”

Since torture is the subject that I have written about more frequently than anything else since I started this blog one year ago, I have indeed read previous stories in the Times about torture, including a particularly egregious one last spring by Scott Shane, which suggested a kind of moral equivalency between opponents and proponents of torture: “Certainly the debate is rich in emotion, with each side claiming the moral heights: You approve torture! You’re coddling terrorists! But the arguments have been scant on science to back them up.”

Then Shane revealed the crucial science which had been ignored in the debate: “…[T]he [Army Field] manual’s inherited wisdom has not been updated to reflect decades of corporate analysis of how to influence consumers. Behavioral economists have dissected decision-making, and academic psychologists have studied political persuasion, but their lessons have not informed the interrogator’s art either.” (I told Baquet that this was one of the oddest observations I had ever read in a newspaper.)

In that same piece, Shane also quoted Benjamin Wittes, a fellow at the Brookings Institution and a longtime defender of the Bush Administration: “We don’t have any idea — other than anecdote or moral philosophy — what really works.”

That is flatly false.

The one story on this subject that should be required reading for everyone is the piece by a former senior interrogator in Iraq in last Sunday’s Outlook section of The Washington Post, entitled “I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.”

Like every one of those retired generals and admirals who has fought against the current administration’s torture policies, the author of the Post piece DOES know what works:

I taught the members of my unit a new methodology — one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi. Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

This piece also includes the best description anywhere of the immorality—and absolute counter-productivity—of the single worst policy in which the United States has engaged since it annihilated most of the Native American population in the 18th and 19th centuries:

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives. I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me – unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

Those are the words Barack Obama needs to remember—and those are the ideas and the facts that you have not read in The New York Times.

Charles Kaiser’s follow-up:

Above the Fold: Sins of Omission
NYT strategically chops Sen. Feinstein’s statement on torture

By Charles Kaiser

Yesterday, FCP focused on a New York Times story about Barack Obama’s search for a new CIA director. Top candidate John O. Brennan had removed himself from consideration for the post after being accused of complicity in the policy which allowed the torturing of prisoners by CIA agents.

I attacked the story because I thought I thought it read like a press release written by past and present CIA officials, determined to head off an investigation of torture abuses.

When I interviewed Mark Mazzetti, who wrote the Times piece with Scott Shane, I told him that one reason the piece struck me as deficient was that it barely balanced the views of the CIA officials it quoted. Mazzetti replied by pointing to the middle section of the story: “We quoted two leading Democratic senators who, we were interested to hear, that they professed some—you know—a degree of flexibility on this subject. Not flexibility—they seem to take a different stance, or a slightly more nuanced stance than they had over the past year—so we quoted both of them.”

The senators were Ron Wyden of Oregon and Dianne Feinstein of California—but it turns out that Feinstein is not as flexible as the Times indicated. This was what was presented in yesterday’s story as evidence of Senator Feinstein’s new “flexibility” toward allowing torture in interrogations:

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who will take over as chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee in January, led the fight this year to force the C.I.A. to follow military interrogation rules. Her bill was passed by Congress but vetoed by President Bush. But in an interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility. “I think that you have to use the noncoercive standard to the greatest extent possible,” she said, raising the possibility that an imminent terrorist threat might require special measures. Afterward, however, Mrs. Feinstein issued a statement saying: “The law must reflect a single clear standard across the government, and right now, the best choice appears to be the Army Field Manual. I recognize that there are other views, and I am willing to work with the new administration to consider them.

But that wasn’t everything Feinstein told the Times. Spencer Ackerman reported today in The Washington Independent that the Times omitted the final sentence in the statement Feinstein issued—a sentence which alters the thrust of her remarks quite dramatically:

“However,” Feinstein said, “my intent is to pass a law that effectively bans torture, complies with all laws and treaties, and provides a single standard across the government.”

A spokesman for Feinstein told FCP today that the senator is now demanding a “clarification” from the Times to learn why that sentence was omitted.

Harper’s contributing editor Scott Horton, who has blogged extensively on this subject, said this about the Times’s omission: “I think this disclosure only serves to underscore the overarching question about this piece. What was the news purpose of this piece? It seems to have been the vehicle for manufactured or false news.”

FCP queried executive editor Bill Keller, Washington bureau chief Dean Baquet, standards editor Craig Whitney, and reporters Mazzetti and Shane about who had made the decision to distort the senator’s remarks by omitting that sentence. FCP also asked if there would be an editor’s note in tomorrow’s paper explaining what had happened. So far, only Whitney has responded, saying he would “find out” if there would be an editor’s note tomorrow, “but it might take longer than that….”

A former top editor of the Times told FCP today that the error required a corrective story, not just an editor’s note. FCP is quite sure about what would happen to the editor or reporter responsible for distorting Feinstein’s position if his former boss, the late Abe Rosenthal, were still the executive editor of The New York Times.

That person would be fired.

Postscript: Scott Shane called FCP after this was posted and said he didn’t see how the omission of that sentence changed the meaning of Feinstein’s statement. Which led to this exchange:

FCP: Why did you leave it out?Shane: Well, we left out tons of things. She talked for a long, long time.

FCP: Well, the trouble with leaving out this sentence is that it makes your whole story look phony. And I’m sorry that you don’t understand that.

Shane: Well, you guys are all dicing and slicing this story in various ways. But a couple of your blogging colleagues read it the other way, and said that the last sentence reinforces…

FCP: They’re entitled to their opinion, and you’re entitled to yours.

Add comment December 4th, 2008

Harvard Law students take on Jack Goldsmith’s protection of US torturers

Recently, Jack Goldsmith wrote a Washington Post op-ed opposing any further investigations or accountability for US torture. Goldsmith is well known as the attorney, who as head of the “Justice” Department Office of Legal Counsel rescinded the Yoo-Bybee memos legalizing torture. Less well known is that, in the process, Goldsmith said that all the actions ["torture" in normal language] were still legal, though the rationales under which they were undertaken were flawed. thus, tortre was fine, but Yoo-Bybee’s legal reasoning was not. Unfortunately, as a consesequence, Goldsmith got an undeserved reputation as an torture opponent. He is now using that reputation to help protect the torturers and keeep their secrets secret.

It has fallen to a few brave Harvard Law School students to denounce Goldsmith’s argument in the Harvard Law Record [Note: Goldsmith is now a professor at Harvard Law School]:

Obama administration must investigate Bush era conduct in the War on Terror

By Katherine Glenn, Anna Myles-Primakoff, and the Board of the HLS Advocates for Human Rights

Last week, Professor Jack Goldsmith published an opinion piece in the Washington Post in which he argued that the Obama administration should not conduct any new investigations into the Bush administration’s authorization of its “harsh, abusive and illegal interrogation program.” Goldsmith, who was an United States Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel during the Bush Adminstration, believes that new investigations into this authorization of torture are unnecessary because we already know most of the story behind the approval of this program and, worse, any new inquiries could compromise national security by “spooking” the intelligence community, making them hesitant to undertake important counterterrorism actions. He also believes that those who “made mistakes” have already been held accountable through severe criticism and loss to their reputations and finances.

Goldsmith’s piece has already been critiqued by a number of analysts and commentators. But his article is particularly troubling for some of us at Harvard Law School who do not share his views. It misrepresents the actions that led to the authorization of torture, it ignores the legal significance of those actions, and it neglects the value that proper investigation and punishment of those actions would have.

Claiming that there is no reason to investigate because those likely to be implicated have already suffered enough is not particularly convincing, given the gravity of the wrongdoing in question.

Reading the now-infamous “torture memos,” in which U.S. and international laws were stretched, bent, and twisted in order to put a legal varnish on the use of interrogation methods well-established as torture, suggests more than a simple “mistake.” The men and women who crafted the legal arguments justifying the use of torture as state policy are intelligent and highly-trained lawyers, who knew and understood the law well. Signing off on interrogation techniques like waterboarding and the use of attack dogs cannot be credibly characterized as actions that “seemed reasonable at the time but now seem inappropriate.” These facts all suggest deliberate distortion of the law to justify patently illegal actions.

The torture memos in particular indicate that, at the very least, the ethical obligations of the legal profession were breached. However, approving the use of torture during interrogations is more than just an ethical violation; it is a war crime that, under the laws of this country, calls for prosecution. An investigation is required to determine who, if anyone, should be charged. The fact that some of the individuals involved have suffered damage to their reputation and finances is no substitute for appropriate punishment if a crime has been committed. To argue otherwise is to suggest that the rule of law does not apply to those at the highest levels of government.

Furthermore, Goldsmith’s argument that further investigation will lead the decision-makers in our military and intelligence agencies to “lawyer up” and behave more cautiously, to the detriment of national security, ignores the fact that the “airtight legal opinions” given by the Justice Department were clearly distorted interpretations of the law. One of the lessons we have learned from the machinations of the Bush administration during the War on Terror is that legal practitioners must be able to give advice-even on highly sensitive issues-without undue political influence.

The Office of Legal Counsel is intended to advise the president on what actions he or she may legally take, not to craft shamefully twisted legal arguments to justify whatever action the president wishes to take. An investigation into what went on sends the message that legal advice must be reliable, consistent and non-politicized. Rather than making national security officials skittish, investigation and prosecution of those responsible for the authorization of torture should have the opposite effect: in the future, officials could feel confident that the legal advice they were given would stand up to future scrutiny, because distorted, “rubber stamp” legal advice will no longer be acceptable.

In claiming that further action on these issues would bring “little benefit,” Goldsmith fails to recognize the value that thorough investigations, followed by prosecution where required, would have both at home and abroad. Notably absent from Goldsmith’s analysis is the potential benefit that such an investigation might have for the many people who were illegally detained and tortured at the hands of United States officials. Investigations would provide an opportunity to begin to make amends to those who were harmed-and in some cases, killed-by the illegal actions of our government. Moreover, investigations would provide the American public with the truth about what exactly was done in their name, and by whom. Such a process can further enhance security by restoring our badly damaged international reputation.

We must reaffirm our commitment to the rule of law, not only to demonstrate that no one in this country is above it, but also to show the world that fighting terrorism does not require the abandonment of our most dearly-held principles.

Add comment December 4th, 2008

Did the New York Times distort Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s plans for anti-torture legislation?

Apparently the  New York Times distorted Senator Dianne Feinstein’s comments on torture. As Spencer Ackerman clarifies. See also  the distortion reported by Andrew Sullivan.

Let’s Get One Thing Straight

By: Spencer Ackerman

Yesterday, in an interview with The New York Times’ Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane, Sen. Dianne Feinstein appeared to leave rhetorical wiggle room about whether the CIA could use torture during interrogations. Her staff clarified the statement, and then clarified to me a little further — though I shouldn’t have said in my updated headline that the Times misquoted her. But now, following continued concerns voiced by Glenn Greenwald and others, it seems she has clarified the clarified clarification.

Here’s what she told Time’s Michael Scherer:

I strongly believe there should be a single, clear standard for interrogation across the federal government, and that this standard should comply with the Geneva Convention, the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and U.S. law. I plan to introduce legislation in January that would close Guantanamo, make the Army Field Manual the single standard for interrogations, prohibit contractors from being used to carry out interrogations and provide the International Committee of the Red Cross with access to detainees. If the incoming administration decides to propose an alternative to this legislation, I am willing to hear its views. But I believe we must put an end to coercive interrogations by the CIA.

This is clearly more specific about what Feinstein, the incoming chairwoman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, thinks is appropriate in interrogations. She clarifies that she isn’t backing away from making the Army Field Manual on Interrogations the proper government-wide standard, which her previous statement didn’t do. And it’s hard to see, after this statement, how Feinstein is taking any position that could remotely be construed as lax on torture.

What still confuses me is why she stepped out into these waters in the first place. Did she misspeak? Sure, OK, we all do from time to time. Was she trying not to get out in front of the still-coalescing Obama administration? Or is there actually some significant push from some unknown-to-me quarter, in either the new administration or the intelligence community, to resist making the Army Field Manual the new interrogation standard?

1 comment December 4th, 2008

Accountability: Mukasey defends torture attorneys

AG Mukasey defends the torturers lawyers:

US official opposes prosecutions for torture advice

By James Vicini, Reuters

WASHINGTON, Dec 3 (Reuters) - Departing U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey said on Wednesday that he saw no reason for prosecutions or for pardons for those who gave legal advice on the Bush administration’s terrorism policies.

Some human rights groups have urged President-elect Barack Obama to launch criminal investigations into the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques on al Qaeda terrorism suspects.

They also have questioned whether the Bush administration broke the law with its warrantless domestic spying program adopted after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

Obama’s advisers have yet to say what he will do, but one idea being considered is creating an independent commission, like the one that investigated the Sept. 11 attacks, to examine the interrogation policies.

There has been speculation that President George W. Bush, before he leaves office next month and hands over to Obama, might give pardons to past or present officials implicated in the harsh interrogation methods or other abuses.

Mukasey told reporters at the Justice Department that he did not see the need for prosecutions or for pardons.

“There is absolutely no evidence that anybody who rendered a legal opinion either with respect to surveillance or with respect to interrogation policy did so for any reason other than to protect the security of the country and in the belief that he or she was doing something lawful,” he said.

“In those circumstances, there is no occasion to consider prosecutions, there is no occasion to consider pardons,” Mukasey said.

Mukasey said he had not yet met with Eric Holder, a Washington lawyer who has been selected by Obama as the new attorney general, and he declined to say what advice he would give him.

But Mukasey noted changes at the Justice Department since Holder served as deputy attorney general under President Bill Clinton, with the creation of the national security division.

Asked about the potential for an attack in the United States during the transition period to Obama, Mukasey replied, “Terrorist groups strike when they are ready to strike,” not according to the political calendar or schedule of events.

Obama has vowed he will close the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, which now holds about 255 terrorism suspects.

Mukasey said he strongly believed that none of the detainees should be released into the United States.

And if one of the dangerous detainees receives a short sentence from a military tribunal, Mukasey said it would be “suicidal” to release that person after the sentence has been served. Asked if that was justice, he answered, “Yes.”

Mukasey, a former federal judge, said he planned to go back to New York, but said he had not yet decided what he will do.

Add comment December 3rd, 2008

Obama’s grandfather victim of British torture

The London Times reports that Barack Obama’s grandfather was the victim of British colonial torture during the brutal suppression of the Mau Mau rebellion. One can only hope that this horrific history will sensitize the new President to the need to abolish once and for all this type of violence. One can also hope that this story will remind us that the “democracies” are past masters at torture. Of course, as Daurius Rejali has pointed out, in many places they turned to “soft torture,” because they are easier to hide.

Beatings and abuse made Barack Obama’s grandfather loathe the British
The President-elect’s relatives have told how the family was a victim of the Mau Mau revolt

By Ben Macintyre and Paul Orengoh

Barack Obama’s grandfather was imprisoned and brutally tortured by the British during the violent struggle for Kenyan independence, according to the Kenyan family of the US President-elect.

Hussein Onyango Obama, Mr Obama’s paternal grandfather, became involved in the Kenyan independence movement while working as a cook for a British army officer after the war. He was arrested in 1949 and jailed for two years in a high-security prison where, according to his family, he was subjected to horrific violence to extract information about the growing insurgency.

“The African warders were instructed by the white soldiers to whip him every morning and evening till he confessed,” said Sarah Onyango, Hussein Onyango’s third wife, the woman Mr Obama refers to as “Granny Sarah”.

Mrs Onyango, 87, described how “white soldiers” visited the prison every two or three days to carry out “disciplinary action” on the inmates suspected of subversive activities.

“He said they would sometimes squeeze his testicles with parallel metallic rods. They also pierced his nails and buttocks with a sharp pin, with his hands and legs tied together with his head facing down,” she said The alleged torture was said to have left Mr Onyango permanently scarred, and bitterly antiBritish. “That was the time we realised that the British were actually not friends but, instead, enemies,” Mrs Onyango said. “My husband had worked so diligently for them, only to be arrested and detained.”

Mr Obama refers briefly to his grandfather’s imprisonment in his best-selling memoir, Dreams from My Father, but states that his grandfather was “found innocent” and held only for “more than six months”.

Mr Onyango served with the British Army in Burma during the Second World War and, like many army veterans, he returned to Africa hoping to win greater freedoms from colonial rule. Although a member of the Luo tribe from western Kenya, he sympathised with the Kikuyu Central Association, the organisation leading an independence movement that would evolve into the bloody uprising known as the Mau Mau rebellion.

“He did not like the way British soldiers and colonialists were treating Africans, especially members of the Kikuyu Central Association, who at the time were believed to be secretly taking oaths which included promises to kill the white settlers and colonialists,” Mrs Onyango said.

In his book, Mr Obama implies that his grandfather was not directly involved in the anticolonial agitation, but his grandmother said that her husband had supplied information to the insurgents. “His job as cook to a British army officer made him a useful informer for the secret oathing movement which would later form the Mau Mau rebellion,” she said. The Mau Mau used oaths as part of their initiation ceremony.

Mr Onyango was probably tried in a magistrates’ court on charges of political sedition or membership of a banned organisation, but the records do not survive because all such documentation was routinely destroyed in British colonies after six years.

“To arrest a Luo ex-soldier, who must have been a senior figure in the community, is pretty serious. They must have had some damn good evidence,” said Professor David Anderson, director of the African Studies Centre at the University of Oxford and an authority on the Mau Mau rebellion.

The British responded to the Mau Mau uprising with draconian violence: at least 12,000 rebels were killed, most of them Kikuyu, but some historians believe that the overall death toll may have been more than 50,000. In total, just 32 European settlers were killed.

According to his widow, Mr Onyango was denounced to the authorities by his white employer, who sacked him on suspicion of consorting with “troublemakers”. He may also have been the victim of a feud with an African neighbour who worked in the district commissioner’s office. Mr Onyango, notoriously outspoken, appears to have accused this official of corruption.

According to Mrs Onyango, her husband was arrested by two soldiers, and taken to Kamiti prison, the national maximum-security prison outside Nairobi.

“This was like a death camp because some detainees died while being tortured,” Mrs Onyango said. “We were not allowed to see him, not even taking him food.” She said her husband was told that he would be killed or maimed if he refused to reveal what he knew of the insurgency, and was beaten repeatedly until he promised “never to rejoin any groupings opposed to the white man’s rule”. Even after he had confessed, and renounced the insurgency, the physical abuse allegedly continued.

Some of Mr Onyango’s fellow inmates were beaten to death with clubs, according to Mrs Onyango. “In fact, my late husband was lucky to have left the prison alive without any serious bodily harm, save for the permanent scars from beatings and torture, which remained on his body till he died.”

Like all family histories, retold many years after the events, some elements of Mrs Onyango’s account are hazy. For example, the white men she described as “soldiers” are far more likely to have been Special Branch officers, who wore a uniform that was indistinguishable from military uniform to most Africans.

Mrs Onyango also described an incident of her husband’s “torture”, which was nothing of the sort. “The white soldiers would spray his body with an itching chemical. This, he said, could make him scratch his body till it bled.” Almost certainly, Mr Onyango was being treated for body lice but apparently he was so used to brutality that he assumed the routine chemical delousing treatment was another form of abuse.

During Mr Obama’s first visit to Kenya in 1988, his grandmother recalled the growing resentment against white colonial rule in Kenya, with rallies and mounting violence that would explode into full-scale rebellion in 1952. “Most of this activity centred on Kikuyuland,” she told him. “But the Luo, too, were oppressed, a main source of forced labour. Men in our area began to join the Kikuyu in demonstrations . . . many men were detained, some never to be seen again.”

The British colonial authorities began a sustained campaign to quell the Mau Mau uprising, establishing numerous detention camps that some historians describe as “Kenya’s Gulag”, where inmates were frequently abused. “There was torture in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency, institutional and systematic, and also casual and haphazard,” Professor Anderson writes in Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (2005). “Violence . . . was intrinsic to the system, and the use of force to compel obedience was sanctioned at the highest level.”

At the height of the rebellion, an estimated 71,000 Kenyans were held in prison camps. The vast majority were never convicted. Letters smuggled out of the camps complained of systematic brutality by warders and guards. According to the Harvard historian Caroline Elkins, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her exposé of British atrocities during the Mau Mau uprising, there were reports of sexual violence and mutilation using “castration pliers”. “This was an instrument devised to crush the men’s testicles,” she writes in Britain’s Gulag: The Brutal End of Empire in Kenya (2005). “Other detainees also described castration pliers, along with other methods of beating and mutilating men’s testicles.”

Several hundred letters from camp inmates survive in the Kenyan National Archives, “chronicling camp conditions, forced labour, torture, starvation and murder”, according to Ms Elkins. One white policeman, Duncan McPherson, told Barbara Castle, the former MP, that conditions in some detention camps were “worse, far worse, than anything I experienced in my 4½ years as a prisoner of the Japanese”.

Mr Onyango was 56 when he was arrested, and he emerged from imprisonment prematurely aged and deeply embittered. In his memoir, Mr Obama described his grandfather’s shocking physical state: “When he returned to Alego he was very thin and dirty. He had difficulty walking, and his head was full of lice.” For some time, he was too traumatised to speak about his experiences. Mrs Onyango told her grandson: “From that day on, I saw that he was now an old man.”

Understandably, Mr Onyango held a lifelong grudge against the British for the way he had been treated, yet he was doubtful that the independence movement would succeed. “How can the African defeat the white man,” he told his son, “when he cannot even make his own bicycle?”

Barack Obama Sr, Mr Onyango’s son and the President-elect’s father, seems to have inherited his father’s attitudes towards the colonial power. He was also arrested, for attending a meeting in Nairobi of the Kenya African National Union (Kanu), the organisation spearheading the independence movement. Mrs Onyango told Mr Obama that his father, unlike her husband, had been held only for a short time in the white man’s prison: “Because he was not a leader in Kanu, Barack was released after a few days.”

Mr Onyango was a victim of the fight for Kenyan independence, but his son became a direct beneficiary of that movement. In 1960, Barack Obama Sr travelled on a scholarship to the University of Hawaii, as part of a programme (sponsored by John F. Kennedy) to train young Kenyans to rule their own country.

Mrs Onyango said that the combative spirit shown by her husband during Kenya’s bloody independence struggle has passed down through the generations to the future president. “This family lineage has all along been made up of fighters,” she said. “Senator Barack Obama is fighting using his brain, like his father, while his grandfather fought physically with the white man.”

Bloody birth of a nation

— In 1895, the British Government establishes the East Africa Protectorate and opens up the fertile highlands of Kenya to whites

— Kenya becomes a British colony in 1920. A year later, members of the Kikuyu tribe, angered by exclusion from political representation, form Kenya’s first African political protest movement

— In 1952, the Mau Mau rebellion against colonial rule erupts and for the next seven years Kenya is under a state of emergency

— Uprising is put down by military action and the detention of thousands of Mau Mau suspects in prison camps. Only 32 European civilians are killed in the violence, but more than 50,000 Africans are believed to have died

— Kenya becomes independent on December 12, 1963, with Jomo Kenyatta elected its first President

Add comment December 3rd, 2008

Former Guantanamo prosecutor speaks to BBC

The BBC has an interview with Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, a Guantanamo prosecutor who gave up his career in the military because he no longer believed that the Military Commissions were providing a fair process. Lt. Col. Vandeveld will be known to regular readers of this site as the former prosecutor of Mohammed Jawad, the youth who was abused on the recommendation of a BSCT psychologist.  On the BBC web site one can also view three short videos with Lt. Col. Vandeveld:

Guantanamo prosecutor speaks out

Guantanamo lawyer tells why he quit

Guantanamo lawyer emailed priest

As a psychologist, when I read these accounts of career military attorneys taking great personal risks to oppose an unjust system, I wonder, Where Are the Psychologists? Not one psychologist is known to have risked his or her career to protest the systemic abuses. [The only known partial exception is Michael Gelles, who protested the worst abuses at Guantanamo in 2002, n perhaps later. But Gelles was supported by his chain of command and insists his career was not injured as a result.]

Guantanamo ‘a stain on US military’

By Gordon Corera, Security correspondent, BBC News

The tribunals used for putting suspects on trial at Guantanamo Bay are a “stain on America’s military”, a former military prosecutor has told the BBC in his first interview since resigning.

For Lt Col Darrel Vandeveld, a devout Catholic, the twin responsibilities of religious faith and military duty led to a profound moral crisis.

His resignation has led to charges against six inmates being dropped, at least for now, and called into question the possibility of a fair legal process at Guantanamo.

“I know so many fighting men and women who are stained by the taint of Guantanamo, so I’m here to tell the truth about Guantanamo and how a few people have sullied the American military and the constitution,” he told me during an interview in his home town of Erie, Pennsylvania.

A reservist, Darrel Vandeveld was called up as a military lawyer after 9/11 and served in Iraq, Bosnia and Africa.

In 2007, he became a prosecutor for the military commissions which tried terrorist suspects held at Guantanamo Bay, a role he took enthusiastically.

“I went down there on a mission and my mission was to convict as many of these detainees as possible and put them in prison for as long as I possibly could,” he told the BBC.

“I had zero doubts. I was a true believer.”

But his zeal did not last long.

When he arrived, he says he found the prosecutor’s office in chaos, with boxes scattered around the floor, files disorganised, evidence scattered in different places and no clear chain of command.

And more seriously, he soon discovered that defence lawyers were not receiving information which could help clear their clients, including evidence that suspects had been “mistreated” in order to secure confessions.

Accused of attack

It was one case in particular, that of a young Afghan called Mohammed Jawad, which caused most concern.

Mr Jawad was accused of throwing a grenade at a US military vehicle.

Col Vandeveld says that in a locker he found indisputable evidence that Mr Jawad had been mistreated.

After Mr Jawad had tried to commit suicide by banging his head against a wall at Guantanamo, Col Vandeveld says that psychologists who assisted interrogators advised taking advantage of Mr Jawad’s vulnerability by subjecting him to specialist interrogation techniques known as “fear up”.

He was also placed, Col Vandeveld says, into what was known as the “frequent flyer” programme in which he was moved from cell to cell every few hours, with the aim of preventing him sleeping properly, and securing a confession.

A devout Catholic, Col Vandeveld found himself deeply troubled by what he discovered.

But the classified nature of his work meant he was unable to share his growing doubts with friends and family.

As a result, he took the unusual step of emailing a Jesuit priest called Father John Dear, who is a well known peace activist.

In his email, Col Vandeveld talked of having “grave misgivings”.

Father Dear was initially unsure if the email was serious and fashioned a quick reply.

“I sort of didn’t believe it. But on the off chance he was a military prosecutor I wrote back and said ‘quit’.”

Col Vandeveld says his jaw dropped when he read the email, adding: “I lived in dread of that answer.”

But eventually he did resign and has chosen to speak out about what he saw, giving the BBC his first interview.

“I never suffered such anguish in my life about anything,” he says, looking back over the period.

“It took me too long to recognise that we had abandoned our American values and defiled our constitution.”

Cases dropped

Col Vandeveld was prosecuting six cases, including that of Binyam Mohamed, the last British resident held at Guantanamo.

After his resignation, charges in these cases were dropped but with the possibility they may be re-filed at any point.

Col Vandeveld declined to discuss details of Mr Mohamed’s case and others which remain classified.

But Binyam Mohamed’s lawyers say he was tortured as part of the CIA’s extraordinary rendition programme and are hopeful that he may not be charged again, on the grounds that this might reveal too many details of the rendition programme.

Col Vandeveld was forced to undergo a mental status evaluation after expressing his concerns and his military career is over.

But he has returned to his community in Erie where local newspapers have praised the stand he took. He has no regrets.

In response to his claims, a Pentagon spokesman told the BBC: “We dispute Darrel Vandeveld’s assertions and maintain the military commission process provides full and fair trials to accused unlawful enemy combatants who are charged with a variety of war crimes.”

President-elect Barack Obama has said he wants to shut Guantanamo but no-one thinks it will be easy.

Col Vandeveld believes that it is possible though.

“No justice will be obtained at Guantanamo,” he said. “And if that entails moving them (the suspects) temporarily to the US for trial: so be it.”

1 comment December 3rd, 2008

Should Charles Graner be punished while the leaders go free?

Mark Benjamin in Salon raises questions about the punishment of Abu Ghraib MP Charles Graner while those who authorized abuse go free. He also gives us a glimpse of the brutality of “military justice.” Regardless of what one thinks about punishment of Graner, no one should be treated as he is. It is a sign, as was Abu Ghraib itself, of the lack of civilization in the US, that anyone would be kept in such inhumane conditions:

Sympathy for Charles Graner
No one from the Bush administration has been held accountable for torture. But the guard from Abu Ghraib prison is still behind bars, and his family wants to know why

By Mark Benjamin

The detainee held on charges related to the so-called war on terror is clad in an orange jumpsuit. His wrists are shackled to a leather belt cinched tight around his waist. A short chain connects his ankles, so he can only shuffle down the barren hallways of the prison, escorted by a guard at each arm.

He has spent more than 29 months in solitary confinement over the past four years, allowed out of his narrow cell during some of that period only to stretch his legs, alone, for one hour a day. In solitary, he has almost no contact with other human beings. He is allowed no radio, no TV and, in a disorienting twist, no watch or calendar to mark the brutal grind of passing time.

With so little stimulation, the brain begins to work against itself. Prisoners in solitary have described delusions, even hallucinations. It can drive a man mad.

“Karma really is a son of a gun!” says Charles Graner, infamous as the torturer of Abu Ghraib, in one of several letters he has written me from Fort Leavenworth, Kan., where he has been incarcerated since his conviction in January 2005 on charges related to the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the U.S. prison in Abu Ghraib, Iraq. “Add a couple of years, change the color of my uniform and I find myself in the same position.”

You remember Graner, the alleged ringleader of abuse at Abu Ghraib who showed up in those harrowing photos back in 2004. He was the mustachioed man grinning eerily back at the camera, giving a thumbs up as he stood over the body of dead prisoner. The pictures remain some of the most notorious images from the war. He and other soldiers at Abu Ghraib forced prisoners into stress positions and frightened them with dogs, stripped prisoners naked, put hoods and women’s underwear over their heads. Graner, a 36-year-old reservist from Pennsylvania, faced 10 counts under five charges: assault, conspiracy, maltreatment of detainees, indecent acts and dereliction of duty. He was found guilty on all counts, except for one assault count that was downgraded to battery, and sentenced to 10 years in prison.

After staring at the image of a naked, humiliated detainee with a bag over his head, it is easy to argue that Graner deserves whatever he gets. But Graner is now the only person involved in the Abu Ghraib scandal who is still behind bars. Of the eight other enlisted military personnel whom the Army tried and convicted in courts-martial in connection with the abuses, none is now in prison. (The sole officer who was tried was acquitted.) Staff Sgt. Ivan Frederick, the other alleged ringleader, got eight years, but his sentence was commuted and he is out of jail. Pfc. Lynndie England is not in jail. Everyone but Graner is free.

Years of revelations, however, show that the prisoner abuse started at the top, yet nobody who ordered the abuse has ever been tried or convicted of anything. The Army convicted a handful of soldiers from Abu Ghraib in courts-martial focused almost exclusively on acts captured by the soldiers’ own digital cameras, not on policy decisions from above. As the nation prepares to change presidents, the administration that sanctioned, encouraged or ordered the abuse of prisoners taken in the war on terror is about to leave office, having long ago decided that no one in a position of authority will be held accountable. The incoming Obama administration is still wrestling with how it will deal with this legacy; as Salon was the first to report, there may be a torture commission that will weigh whether to prosecute both the perpetrators of torture and the architects of the policy under which the abuse took place. As Salon was also the first to report, there may be no criminal prosecutions at all.

Does Graner deserve jail time while Vice President Dick Cheney prepares to reenter private life, and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld puts the finishing touches on his memoirs? In one of his letters to me, Graner once wrote that the difference between him and Rumsfeld is that in Graner’s case, “the pictures came out.”

Mary Ellen O’Connell, a professor of international law at Notre Dame Law School, believes that Graner belongs in prison. But she has also been discussing with colleagues, and debating in public forums, the viability of prosecuting Bush administration officials for torture, and she is troubled by the double standard.

“There were failures at the top that led to Abu Ghraib and Graner’s conviction,” O’Connell said. “The fact is that there is good law to hold these individuals accountable. So why aren’t we holding everyone accountable who is implicated?”

“They all did what they were told,” said Irma Graner, mother of Charles, of her son and the other soldiers at Abu Ghraib. “And the ones that told them to do it escaped everything.”

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The steel and glass of downtown Pittsburgh don’t melt slowly into suburbia, but end relatively abruptly. Drive south out of downtown for just a few minutes and you are winding through the hairpin turns and steep, evergreen-lined hills that made up the domestic backdrop for the 1978 film “The Deer Hunter.”

Several miles north of Clairton, where some of that movie took place, sits the modest two-story home where Graner grew up, nestled in a tidy suburban neighborhood, the kind where everybody knows the mailman’s name.

A wide living room window dominates the front of Graner’s childhood home. Taped in the middle of the window is a photo about the size of notebook paper: a young Marine in his dress uniform, looking stern and tough for the camera. It is a young Graner in the Marine Corps, years before he joined the Army.

Charles senior, Graner’s father, goes by the name Red. He has a warm, welcoming demeanor. He works for U.S. Airways’ maintenance control. Graner’s mother, Irma, a gentle, soft-spoken woman, raised Graner and his two sisters. Both parents waited at the front door when I walked up the drive one day late last summer, past the photo of their son in the window.

“People are finally realizing that [the orders for abuse] came from the top,” Red said hopefully as the three of us sat at the Graners’ polished wooden dining room table. “We knew it all along.”

We thumbed through pictures of Charles Graner Jr.: “Chuck” as a young boy snuggling in Santa’s lap during the holidays, smiling through a green football helmet a few years later, graduating from Marine boot camp at Parris Island, dressed in a tuxedo, holding hands with his two kids.

Graner, born in 1968, was an avid, if not particularly gifted, athlete as a kid, who played Little League football and baseball. Red volunteered as his coach through much of Graner’s youth. By high school Graner was on the track team. He did the pole vault. He ran for president of the student council.

After high school and a couple years of college, Graner joined the Marines in 1988. He served in the first Gulf War. He came home with the panic attacks and insomnia that were common among war veterans, but like many others, he had trouble documenting to the government his exposure to trauma during the war in order to get help. If only he’d had photos, he told his parents. A dozen years later, there were pictures, too many of them.

After marriage (and two kids) and divorce, and stints as a school custodian and a prison guard, Graner joined the Army Reserve in early 2002. He was called to active duty in Iraq in 2003. Graner was assigned to Abu Ghraib, Iraq, as a military policeman with the Army’s 372nd Military Police Company. Part of Saddam Hussein’s notorious prison at Abu Ghraib, where thousands of political prisoners had been tortured and many executed, had been repurposed by the U.S. military as a holding pen for Iraqi detainees. The detainees were interrogated, often cuffed, clad in orange jump suits and routinely subjected to solitary confinement. Charles Graner and the other guards started taking pictures.

The pictures took America by surprise back in 2004. Not so, the Graners. Graner regularly e-mailed his parents about life at the prison, including the abuse. He described the routine brutality at Abu Ghraib in quotidian language that would have seemed strange unless you knew, as we do now, that the soldiers there were mostly doing what they were told to do by the various authority figures who were issuing orders. Graner e-mailed the photos home months before the same pictures put America on its heels.

“He sent me every picture,” Irma said. “I saw the rope. I saw the naked guy.” She recalled that Graner “would write home to us about the Other Government Agency,” a term for the CIA operatives at the prison, who conducted brutal interrogations, including one in which a detainee died chained to a window in a shower room — though no one has faced consequences from that agency. “And they had to hide people when the Red Cross came,” she said.

“Tonight ended up being the same ole same ole,” Graner wrote his parents in an e-mail dated Dec. 12, 2003, four months before the scandal broke. He attached a now-infamous photo of a black dog snarling at a nude detainee cowering outside a cell with his hands on his head. “Inmate tries to break out of cell i find out i punish i bring in dogs i get assaulted dog bites prisoner,” Graner wrote. “I think he was more trying to get away from the dogs than really wanting to assault me but he did and he paid.”

The Abu Ghraib scandal broke in late April 2004, when CBS’ “60 Minutes II” broadcast the horrific images from the prison. While military protocol usually calls for separate chains of command for interrogators and military police, at Abu Ghraib, military police like Graner received their brutal marching orders from military intelligence interrogators and even civilian contractors.

The White House immediately began spinning a version of Abu Ghraib that put all the blame on the lowest ranks. “The practices that took place in that prison are abhorrent and they don’t represent America,” President Bush said on May 5, 2004, in the wake of the scandal. “They represent the actions of a few people.” Bush promised that there would be a “full investigation and justice will be served.”

“These terrible acts were perpetrated by a small number of U.S. military,” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the Senate Armed Services Committee two days later. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, blamed “those few who don’t uphold our military’s values.”

It is challenging to summarize the overwhelming mountain of evidence that pins the blame for the prisoner abuse squarely on the upper ranks of the Bush administration rather than the lower ranks of the Army. More than two years before Bush pledged a full investigation of the events at Abu Ghraib, his attorneys at the Department of Justice approved an interrogation regime for Abu Zubaydah, one of the first suspected al-Qaida operatives held by the CIA; it included techniques, like waterboarding, that were more brutal than anything caught on film at Abu Ghraib. By August 2002, the White House had pried a memo out of the Justice Department that said you weren’t torturing a prisoner unless the treatment was “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death.”

The White House issued two secret memos over the next two years assuring the CIA that the interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, were legal.

On Dec. 2, 2002, Rumsfeld signed a memo authorizing the use of a panoply of abusive interrogation tactics at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, including stress positions, exploitation of phobias such as a fear of dogs, forced nudity, hooding, isolation and sensory deprivation. Lt. Gen. Randall Schmidt, a military investigator, discussed Rumsfeld’s interrogation tactics in a 2005 Army inspector general’s report. Schmidt noted, “Just for the lack of a camera, it would sure look like Abu Ghraib.”

Myers, the chairman who blamed those “few” soldiers at Abu Ghraib, personally quashed further legal review of the interrogation techniques cited in Rumsfeld’s memo, even though officials from the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps all warned they might be illegal.

Rumsfeld’s techniques resulted in an unknown number of detainees suffering at the hands of U.S. interrogators, including the well-documented interrogation at Guantánamo in late 2002 and early 2003 of a detainee named Mohamed al-Kahtani. Kahtani received 18- to 20-hour interrogations during 48 of 54 days and among other things, was forced to stand naked in front of a female interrogator and accused of being a homosexual. Interrogators also forced him to wear women’s underwear and to perform “dog tricks” on a leash. In a sign that the same techniques later migrated to Iraq, a photograph from Abu Ghraib shows Lynndie England holding a dog leash attached to a naked Iraqi detainee. Graner took the photo.

But if Charles Graner and his parents ever harbored any hope for equal justice, it evaporated during Graner’s military court-martial in January 2005 at Fort Hood, Texas. As in the initial internal military investigation, first obtained by Salon, Graner faced a prosecution focused completely and narrowly on the abuses captured on film.

A military judge smothered attempts by Graner’s attorneys to dig into the authorization of abuse up the chain of command. Despite private assurances that Graner could leave the courtroom through a side door, he was frog-marched before the press.

“All they wanted to do was crucify him,” Irma said. Red told me that it was clear that the administration “needed to protect themselves, and I knew they were going to protect themselves. By prosecuting him they severed the link.”

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Red and Irma first traveled to Fort Leavenworth to visit their son in February 2005. “It was terrible,” Irma recalled.

They stepped through a metal detector into a cold stone building, then into a barren room with tables and chairs where family members can meet with prisoners. Graner was nowhere to be seen. This was because he was held in what Fort Leavenworth calls the “special housing unit.”

Red and Irma were led into another, much smaller room with two chairs. “You sit down, there is a metal ledge and a big glass window I don’t think a truck could drive through,” Red remembered.

A door opened. Graner shuffled in. “He was wearing an orange jumpsuit just like they do there at Abu Ghraib,” his father recalled. Graner’s legs were shackled together and his cuffed hands chained to a leather belt around his waist. Two guards escorted him in. The guards loosened the straps that kept his arms cinched to his waist so that he could reach the phone with his cuffed hands and talk with his parents on the other side of the glass.

In a recent letter, Graner described what it was like for him during that visit. “You are locked in a room with a guard sitting three to four feet behind you watching and listening to your conversation. You are wearing shackles around your feet and a body cuff around your waist,” he wrote. “Your arms are attached to your waist by a tether. You are able to see your family through safety glass and speak with them over a phone. All conversations over the phone are recorded.”

Through that phone, Red and Irma heard how their son had been sent into solitary confinement for what seemed like minor infractions. “He left a bar of soap in the shower, in he goes,” Irma explained. “He had one too many magazines, in he goes.” Graner got out one hour a day for exercise, alone. “He was not allowed a radio. No watch, no calendar. I think they are trying to drive him crazy. It is not going to work,” she said. “You try to put on a good face for him. But the first time I had to cry.”

The Graners remembered another visit, nearly a year later. Their son was still in solitary. “I asked a head guard if I could give him a hug. He said he’d check,” Irma recalled. “He said no. The next day was Christmas.”

After each visit, the guards lead Graner out of the tiny room, then subject him to a strip search, despite the glass between him and his parents. It’s ridiculous, Irma complained. “There is no way you can touch him or do anything.”

After the strip search, the guards take Graner back to his cell. For 29 months over the past four years, that has meant solitary confinement.

Irma frowned at the thought of her son being held for months in solitary confinement without so much as a watch to follow the time. “I feel that he has been tortured every day that he has been in that prison,” she said.

I first heard from Graner via letter in early 2006, when he had been in Leavenworth for a year. It was not long after Salon published the Abu Ghraib files, an exhaustive set of photos from the prison and an exclusive exploration of the Army investigation that had led to Graner’s prosecution. Salon followed with months of investigative articles exploring the true origins of government-sanctioned prisoner abuse by the military and the CIA.

On March 31, 2007, Salon published an article about Steven Stefanowicz, a contractor at Abu Ghraib known as Big Steve, whom Army investigators identified as a progenitor of abuse but who faced no legal consequences. I first heard back from Graner soon after.

I had obtained a 307-page transcript of an interview that Graner provided to Army investigators in April 2005, detailing exactly what went on the prison. I mentioned Graner’s 307-page statement in that Big Steve article, writing that Graner had been “granted immunity from further prosecution in exchange for his cooperation” with Army investigators.

A month later I received a friendly letter from Graner, with a Fort Leavenworth return address, noting that he had “enjoyed” my work. “I do have a problem with one thing you have reported about me,” he added. The Army had threatened him with more jail time if he did not cooperate truthfully with Army investigators. “I would appreciate if you … would refrain from implying that I made any type of deal with the government in exchange for immunity, etc. in the future.” Fair enough.

We’ve kept in touch and exchanged letters since then. Once, when Graner was out of solitary, he happened to catch me being interviewed on “Democracy Now!” I was noting that no one had been held accountable for systematic torture under the Bush administration. Graner begged to differ. “Hello. I’m right here,” he wrote to his parents.

As the evidence accumulated over the years implicating top administration officials for prisoner abuse, and as I corresponded with him, Graner’s imprisonment and treatment at the hands of the Army seemed increasingly unfair. In his letters, Graner has discussed so-called Tiger Teams, interrogators arriving from Guantánamo to teach Graner and the others how to abuse detainees. He has also written about the irony of being investigated by the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command, which, he says, was already well aware of the abuse at the prison long before the scandal broke.

But mostly we talk about the conditions of his incarceration at Fort Leavenworth, including solitary confinement. In a letter, Graner described a typical day. “Groundhog day starts at 5:15 a.m. when breakfast is served. After that I would do an hour-ish of yoga and go back to bed until 10 a.m. Lunch is served at 10:45,” he wrote. “Between 2:45 and 3:45 p.m., I am allowed to go outside and will run between 5-8 miles in a cage (there is an inside cage but rain or shine I would rather be outside). Dinner comes at 4 p.m. At 5:30 the guard will take me to shower,” he added. “The times when I am not exercising, I read,” though he added that he has to provide his own books because there is no library access during solitary confinement. “Normally, I fall asleep at 1:30 a.m. (hard to sleep with the lights on 24-7).”

Graner described the continuous light as particularly painful and the combined effect of isolation and continuous light as “insane.” He wrote that it was like “living in your bathroom for over two years with the lights always on.”

The Army has also denied Graner any contact with his second wife, Megan Ambuhl, whom he married while incarcerated. She too had been a guard at Abu Ghraib, and was court-martialed and dismissed from the Army but was never prosecuted. The Army seized letters and prohibited phone calls and visits from March 28, 2005, to Aug. 22, 2007, a total of 920 days.

Graner described the impact that his living conditions were having on him in a Feb. 13, 2008, appeal to an Army clemency board. He was asking for clemency or a commutation of his sentence. “For over a year I was held in a cell exposed to a light, though it may be dimmed, that was on for 24 hours a day,” he wrote in a letter that Red and Irma shared with me. “While I worked for Military Intelligence between October - December 2003, one of the alternative interrogation techniques used was to keep a detainee in light 24 hours a day,” he remembered. “After three days without darkness, there would be a noticeable change in the detainee’s emotional and mental state,” he wrote. “I went my first year in confinement without darkness.”

Graner told the board that he suffered from sleep disturbances and nightmares. He described himself as occasionally withdrawn, sometimes not speaking “for weeks at a time.”

“Having the lights on all of the time was torture for me,” he added.

The board denied him clemency. In his most recent letter to me, mailed Nov. 3, the day before the election, and less than three months before the end of the Bush administration, Graner didn’t hold out much hope for a change in his situation. “When I first arrived at [prison], both the commandant and the deputy commandant told me that I had embarrassed the Military Police Corps and that because of that I would never receive any type of clemency or parole from them,” Graner wrote. “This could have all been talk, but so far all of my co-accused are out of prison. I have received no clemency or parole.”

“The unfairness, that’s what bothers me the most,” said Graner’s father, Red. “It is not just that it is scapegoating — it is that everyone knows it is scapegoating.

“He is in prison and he shouldn’t be.”

Add comment December 2nd, 2008

American deaths, a consequence of US torture

Scott Horton discusses one of the implications of last Sunday’s op-ed by a former Iraqi interrogator. He also lets us know that the interrogator, along with Scott, will b e on Democracy Now! on Wednesday:

How Many Americans Died Because of Bush’s Torture Program?

By Scott Horton

According to a special operations intelligence officer, the answer is a number north of three thousand–not counting the tens of thousands maimed or seriously wounded, the destruction of the nation’s reputation as a moral leader, or the damage done to our Constitution. In a stunning op-ed published in Sunday’s Washington Post, a special operations intelligence officer details his direct experience with torture practices put into effect in Iraq in 2006—long after the Pentagon had forsworn them, but while Donald Rumsfeld was still running the shop.

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

The Pentagon’s claims that it had returned to interrogations based on the venerable Field Manual, was, it seems, conscious disinformation. But the officer offers an assessment. The torture techniques consistently failed to produce actionable intelligence, he said. But the old techniques—which rest on confidence building—consistently worked and gave the interrogators access to information that saved lives. Moreover, the strategies employed to effect later were used as a much broader tactic, accentuating differences between native Iraqi Sunnis and foreign fighters, in what came to be known as the “Sunni Awakening.”

But then we come to the most chilling part of the op-ed, which the writer discloses the Bush Administration struggled to suppress:

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for Al Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me–unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

The torture techniques developed by the Bush torture team were the most effective recruitment tool we could ever have given terrorists. They cost thousands of American lives. And that’s a key element of the legacy of the forty-third president.

Update:

Matthew Alexander, the author of the Post op ed (this is a pseudonym) and I will appear together tomorrow morning on DemocracyNow! with Amy Goodman to discuss his column and afterwards I’ll talk about the accountability issues facing the administration based on “Justice After Bush.” Identify your local broadcaster here and tune in.

Add comment December 2nd, 2008

Interrogator who found Zarqawi speaks out

Yet another veteran interrogator is disillusioned with the Bush administration military’s commitment to abusive, immoral, and ineffective interrogation techniques:

I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq

By Matthew Alexander, Washington Post

I should have felt triumphant when I returned from Iraq in August 2006. Instead, I was worried and exhausted. My team of interrogators had successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaeda in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war. But instead of celebrating our success, my mind was consumed with the unfinished business of our mission: fixing the deeply flawed, ineffective and un-American way the U.S. military conducts interrogations in Iraq. I’m still alarmed about that today.

I’m not some ivory-tower type; I served for 14 years in the U.S. Air Force, began my career as a Special Operations pilot flying helicopters, saw combat in Bosnia and Kosovo, became an Air Force counterintelligence agent, then volunteered to go to Iraq to work as a senior interrogator. What I saw in Iraq still rattles me — both because it betrays our traditions and because it just doesn’t work.

Violence was at its peak during my five-month tour in Iraq. In February 2006, the month before I arrived, Zarqawi’s forces (members of Iraq’s Sunni minority) blew up the golden-domed Askariya mosque in Samarra, a shrine revered by Iraq’s majority Shiites, and unleashed a wave of sectarian bloodshed. Reprisal killings became a daily occurrence, and suicide bombings were as common as car accidents. It felt as if the whole country was being blown to bits.

Amid the chaos, four other Air Force criminal investigators and I joined an elite team of interrogators attempting to locate Zarqawi. What I soon discovered about our methods astonished me. The Army was still conducting interrogations according to the Guantanamo Bay model: Interrogators were nominally using the methods outlined in the U.S. Army Field Manual, the interrogators’ bible, but they were pushing in every way possible to bend the rules — and often break them. I don’t have to belabor the point; dozens of newspaper articles and books have been written about the misconduct that resulted. These interrogations were based on fear and control; they often resulted in torture and abuse.

I refused to participate in such practices, and a month later, I extended that prohibition to the team of interrogators I was assigned to lead. I taught the members of my unit a new methodology — one based on building rapport with suspects, showing cultural understanding and using good old-fashioned brainpower to tease out information. I personally conducted more than 300 interrogations, and I supervised more than 1,000. The methods my team used are not classified (they’re listed in the unclassified Field Manual), but the way we used them was, I like to think, unique. We got to know our enemies, we learned to negotiate with them, and we adapted criminal investigative techniques to our work (something that the Field Manual permits, under the concept of “ruses and trickery”). It worked. Our efforts started a chain of successes that ultimately led to Zarqawi.

Over the course of this renaissance in interrogation tactics, our attitudes changed. We no longer saw our prisoners as the stereotypical al-Qaeda evildoers we had been repeatedly briefed to expect; we saw them as Sunni Iraqis, often family men protecting themselves from Shiite militias and trying to ensure that their fellow Sunnis would still have some access to wealth and power in the new Iraq. Most surprisingly, they turned out to despise al-Qaeda in Iraq as much as they despised us, but Zarqawi and his thugs were willing to provide them with arms and money. I pointed this out to Gen. George Casey, the former top U.S. commander in Iraq, when he visited my prison in the summer of 2006. He did not respond.

Perhaps he should have. It turns out that my team was right to think that many disgruntled Sunnis could be peeled away from Zarqawi. A year later, Gen. David Petraeus helped boost the so-called Anbar Awakening, in which tens of thousands of Sunnis turned against al-Qaeda in Iraq and signed up with U.S. forces, cutting violence in the country dramatically.

Our new interrogation methods led to one of the war’s biggest breakthroughs: We convinced one of Zarqawi’s associates to give up the al-Qaeda in Iraq leader’s location. On June 8, 2006, U.S. warplanes dropped two 500-pound bombs on a house where Zarqawi was meeting with other insurgent leaders.

But Zarqawi’s death wasn’t enough to convince the joint Special Operations task force for which I worked to change its attitude toward interrogations. The old methods continued. I came home from Iraq feeling as if my mission was far from accomplished. Soon after my return, the public learned that another part of our government, the CIA, had repeatedly used waterboarding to try to get information out of detainees.

I know the counter-argument well — that we need the rough stuff for the truly hard cases, such as battle-hardened core leaders of al-Qaeda, not just run-of-the-mill Iraqi insurgents. But that’s not always true: We turned several hard cases, including some foreign fighters, by using our new techniques. A few of them never abandoned the jihadist cause but still gave up critical information. One actually told me, “I thought you would torture me, and when you didn’t, I decided that everything I was told about Americans was wrong. That’s why I decided to cooperate.”

Torture and abuse are against my moral fabric. The cliche still bears repeating: Such outrages are inconsistent with American principles. And then there’s the pragmatic side: Torture and abuse cost American lives.

I learned in Iraq that the No. 1 reason foreign fighters flocked there to fight were the abuses carried out at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Our policy of torture was directly and swiftly recruiting fighters for al-Qaeda in Iraq. The large majority of suicide bombings in Iraq are still carried out by these foreigners. They are also involved in most of the attacks on U.S. and coalition forces in Iraq. It’s no exaggeration to say that at least half of our losses and casualties in that country have come at the hands of foreigners who joined the fray because of our program of detainee abuse. The number of U.S. soldiers who have died because of our torture policy will never be definitively known, but it is fair to say that it is close to the number of lives lost on Sept. 11, 2001. How anyone can say that torture keeps Americans safe is beyond me — unless you don’t count American soldiers as Americans.

After my return from Iraq, I began to write about my experiences because I felt obliged, as a military officer, not only to point out the broken wheel but to try to fix it. When I submitted the manuscript of my book about my Iraq experiences to the Defense Department for a standard review to ensure that it did not contain classified information, I got a nasty shock. Pentagon officials delayed the review past the first printing date and then redacted an extraordinary amount of unclassified material — including passages copied verbatim from the Army’s unclassified Field Manual on interrogations and material vibrantly displayed on the Army’s own Web site. I sued, first to get the review completed and later to appeal the redactions. Apparently, some members of the military command are not only unconvinced by the arguments against torture; they don’t even want the public to hear them.

My experiences have landed me in the middle of another war — one even more important than the Iraq conflict. The war after the war is a fight about who we are as Americans. Murderers like Zarqawi can kill us, but they can’t force us to change who we are. We can only do that to ourselves. One day, when my grandkids sit on my knee and ask me about the war, I’ll say to them, “Which one?”

Americans, including officers like myself, must fight to protect our values not only from al-Qaeda but also from those within our own country who would erode them. Other interrogators are also speaking out, including some former members of the military, the FBI and the CIA who met last summer to condemn torture and have spoken before Congress — at considerable personal risk.

We’re told that our only options are to persist in carrying out torture or to face another terrorist attack. But there truly is a better way to carry out interrogations — and a way to get out of this false choice between torture and terror.

I’m actually quite optimistic these days, in no small measure because President-elect Barack Obama has promised to outlaw the practice of torture throughout our government. But until we renounce the sorts of abuses that have stained our national honor, al-Qaeda will be winning. Zarqawi is dead, but he has still forced us to show the world that we do not adhere to the principles we say we cherish. We’re better than that. We’re smarter, too.

howtobreakaterrorist@gmail.com

***********

Matthew Alexander led an interrogations team assigned to a Special Operations task force in Iraq in 2006. He is the author of “How to Break a Terrorist: The U.S. Interrogators Who Used Brains, Not Brutality, to Take Down the Deadliest Man in Iraq.” He is writing under a pseudonym for security reasons.

Add comment November 30th, 2008

Judge called Mukasey “Tyrant” before AG collapsed

Impassioned dissent on Bush administration apologists now extends to senior judges. It turns out that right before Attorney General Mukasey collapsed, a Washington State Supreme Court jusge yelled “Tyrant!” at him, in protest of Mukasey’s defense of detainee treatment. Elsewhere I read that the judge in question was a member of the conservative Federalist society, where Mukasey was speaking. More and more conservatives can no longer quietly accept this administration’s shredding of the Constitution, international law, and human rights:

Judge yelled ‘tyrant’ at Mukasey before his collapse

By Nick Juliano

Before Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed last week at a speech to the conservative Federalist Society, one audience member could not contain his disapproval with the speech’s subject matter.

Mukasey’s defense of President Bush’s policies on prisoner treatment and their indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay was too much for Washington State Supreme Court Judge Richard Sanders.

He shouted, “Tyrant! You are a tyrant!”

Sanders acknowledged his conduct in an interview with The Seattle Times.

“Frankly, everybody in the room was applauding or sometimes laughing, and I thought, ‘I’ve got to stand up and say something.’ And I did,” he told the paper. “I stood up and said, ‘Tyrant,’ then I sat down again, then I left.”

The outburst came well before Mukasey’s collapse and likely did not contribute to it. Sanders left before the end of Mukasey’s speech because he wasn’t enjoying himself, he told the paper.

While he regrets shouting at the country’s top law enforcement officer, Sanders says he still believes the policies Mukasey was advocating — namely that the US is not obligated to adhere to the Geneva conventions in battling al Qaeda — could lead to “tyranny.” In the speech, Mukasey argued that because the international terrorist group didn’t sign the convention, the US shouldn’t be bound by them, but Sanders said that wasn’t the point.

“I didn’t sign the Geneva Conventions, you didn’t sign the Geneva Conventions, but the United States did sign the Conventions,” he told the Times. “And that’s the point, isn’t it?”

Add comment November 26th, 2008