Psyche, Science, and Society

Closing Guantanamo, plus…

Meteor Blades at Daily Kos says:

Closing Guantanamo Would Be a Good Start, But …

By Meteor Blades

It’s dead certain that Barack Obama will not close Guantánamo Bay on “Day One” as the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are pressing him to do. Unless the effort to shut down the detention center there began right now with the Cheney-Bush administration’s assistance, it would be logistically impossible. Who would be released, and where to? Who would be tried, and in what venue, under what rules? It does appears from news reports, however, that a freshly inaugurated President Obama may well give the order to close the center on his first day in office. That would be one more reason to cheer on January 20.

But Gitmo is only the most high-profile of the prisons set up to hold suspected terrorists after the 2001 attacks. And while it is essential that the restoration of the rule of law include emptying the cells on that portion of permanently leased Cuban soil, there is, as I argued Sunday in Dear President-Elect Obama, far more to do than merely close Gitmo. Other prisons, including the one in Bagram, Afghanistan, which is considered by many observers to be worse than Guantánamo, should be on the table, too. Plus the secret prisons in Thailand, Morocco, and possibly Diego Garcia. Are they empty, as claimed? And what about rendition, that euphemism for political kidnapping, behavior that would have Americans demanding a declaration of war if any government sent its agents to do it in the United States? What will be done with that?

For the moment, however, Guantánamo appears to be all that’s on the table. The Associated Press reports that the President-Elect’s team is moving quickly to set up a means of dealing with the estimated 250 detainees at the detention center:

Under the plan being drawn up by Obama’s advisers, some detainees would be released and others would be charged in U.S. courts, where they would receive constitutional rights and open trials. But, underscoring the difficult decisions Obama must make to fulfill his pledge of shutting down Guantanamo, the plan could require creation of a new legal system to handle the classified information inherent in some of the most sensitive cases. …

Advisers participating directly in the planning spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not final.

“The plan could require creation of a new legal system…” Require? It should come as no surprise that this might be the approach of the Obama administration. As Senator, Obama voted against the obscene Military Commissions Act two years ago, and noted in a putdown of the proposed law:

I’ve heard, for example, the argument that it should be military courts, and not federal judges, who should make decisions on these detainees. I actually agree with that. The problem is that the structure of the military proceedings has been poorly thought through. Indeed, the regulations that are supposed to be governing administrative hearings for these detainees, which should have been issued months ago, still haven’t been issued. Instead, we have rushed through a bill that stands a good chance of being challenged once again in the Supreme Court.

Sure enough, the Court ruled last summer in Boumediene v. Bush that the MCA unconstitutionally suspended habeas corpus for the detainees. That marked the fourth case in which the Supreme Court made mincemeat of the Cheney-Bush administration’s efforts to make the detainees unpersons in a supposedly jurisdictionless bit of real estate fully operated but not owned by the United States.

Some critics, include me among them, see no reason to establish a new legal system to deal with the detainees.

“I think that creating a new alternative court system in response to the abject failure of Guantánamo would be a profound mistake,” Jonathan Hafetz, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney who represents detainees, said Monday. “We do not need a new court system. The last eight years are a testament to the problems of trying to create new systems.”

Glenn Greenwald interviewed ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero today. Much of the interview was about Guantánamo and trials of the detainees. It’s worth clicking through to read the whole interview. Here’s an excerpt:

Now, let me ask you specifically about closing Guantanamo, because that I do think is probably most conducive to being done through unilateral presidential action, since it was done in the first place…

AR: Shut it down, and shut down the military commissions, because it won’t be good enough if you shut down Guantanamo, and then transfer the detainees and charge them under these trials, and use the same screwed-up rules of the military commission at Fort Bragg or Fort Myers or anywhere else. You’ve got to shut down the existing military commissions as well.

GG: Let me ask you about a couple criticisms that are going to be raised quite loudly in the event that he doesn’t come to do that. One of which I think is easily dispensed with that I’m interested in your response, which is, that we simply transfer several hundred highly complex cases to the federal judiciary, that it’s going to overwhelm administratively the courts which are already overburdened and crowd out the ability of other defendants and certainly civil litigants to be heard in the federal court. What’s your response to that?

AR: Well, I think we have very smart administrators in the federal system who can find a way to deal with them and divide them up among the different circuits, making sure that those who have comparable facts and arguments can be dispensed with as a group. And look, the legal system shouldn’t be quick or easy. We’re talking about people’s most fundamental liberties, and the fact is court and judges and trials take time. And that’s because the stakes are so high. I don’t want a quick dirty system that dispenses with people’s rights in a too expedient and a too quick a manner.

The fact is, the government is going to have to bear the burden of proof. Can you try these individuals in a criminal court, or a military commission under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and come forward with the proof that will stand up in courts of law that are governed by the Constitution, and if it can’t, you’ve got to release them. That’s our system. The burden of proof is on the government if you’re going to take away someone’s most fundamental right of freedom and liberty, to show the proof and to demonstrate it to a neutral and an objective judge, and possibly a jury, if it’s a criminal case, a jury of one’s peers, beyond a reasonable doubt. That is the law.

What the Military Commissions Act did was to rewrite the rules of that law. And so, I think frankly the burden is on the government, and it’s had eight years to collect the information on these guys, and if they don’t have it now, they probably ain’t going to have it in the next two or three years. So you’ve got to bite the bullet and if you don’t have the evidence to prosecute them in good American courts of law governed by the Constitution, then the solution is to let them go.

Whatever the differences we progressives may have over resolving this matter, what a joy finally to be discussing the proper way to correct this grotesque violation of human and civil rights carried out in our names.

Add comment November 11th, 2008

Did Bush Admin push false “dirty bomb” charges?

In yet another Guantanamo worse-than-farce development, a federal judge essentially accused Justice Department lawyers of using false accusations — “That doesn’t ring true; it rings hollow,” Sullivan said. “The government has never been concerned with acting expeditiously here” –to justify the kidnapping and rendition to Morocco and perpetual detention at Guantanamo of detainee Binyam Mohammed. Yesterday I posted a British report that Britain may indict CIA officials for Mr. Mohammed’s torture. This Washington Post article claims the British statements were ambiguous:

Motives of Justice Lawyers Questioned in Detainee’s Case

By Peter Finn and Del Quentin Wilber

A federal judge yesterday questioned the motives of Justice Department lawyers for withdrawing allegations linking a Guantanamo Bay detainee to a “dirty bomb” plot in the United States shortly before they were required to hand over exculpatory evidence to the defense.

“That raises serious questions in this court’s mind about whether those allegations were ever true,” said U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan, who is overseeing a lawsuit brought by Binyam Mohammed, 30, a resident of Britain who is challenging his detention at the U.S. military facility in Cuba. Sullivan warned that “someone is going to rue the day those allegations were made” if it turns out that the government had evidence that they were unfounded.

The government said it stood by the allegations but had withdrawn them to expedite proceedings.

Despite that decision, Sullivan ordered the government to turn over any potentially exculpatory information related to the alleged dirty-bomb plot. That could force the government to account for Mohammed’s disappearance from 2002 to 2004.

Mohammed said the CIA rendered him to Morocco weeks after he was arrested in Pakistan in April 2002. His attorneys argue that the government’s allegations are based on confessions their client made after his detention and torture in Morocco, where, they say, he was slashed with razors.

“He parroted what his torturers wanted him to say,” said Zachary Katznelson, one of Mohammed’s attorneys. “All they have are Mr. Mohammed’s own words, and they were extracted at the tip of a razor blade.”

The government said Mohammed voluntarily confessed to a number of terrorist crimes, including the dirty-bomb plot, in 2004 at Bagram air base in Afghanistan before his transfer to Guantanamo Bay. The government has never acknowledged that he was in Morocco.

The dirty-bomb allegation was not pursued in the case of Mohammed’s alleged co-conspirator, Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen initially declared an enemy combatant but convicted in August 2007 on a lesser charge of providing material support for terrorism. He was sentenced to 17 years in prison.

A day before yesterday’s hearing, the United States turned over intelligence documents related to Mohammed that have been the subject of judgments by the British High Court. The British government discovered the documents in its files and declared them potentially exculpatory, but said it preferred they be handed over by the United States because they include classified material from U.S. agencies.

The U.S. government initially resisted, releasing only seven documents, but on Wednesday it turned over the 35 remaining ones. The British court strongly hinted that it would release them if the United States refused to do so.

British officials also told the High Court this week that the “question of possible criminal wrongdoing” in Mohammed’s case has been referred to the country’s attorney general for investigation. It was unclear from a letter to the British court whether the probe would focus only on the actions of British agents or could also charge U.S. officials.

The allegations against Mohammed are now essentially reduced to his having attended terrorist training camps in Afghanistan.

“We have simplified this case to its bare essence,” Andrew I. Warden, a Justice Department lawyer, told Sullivan.

“That doesn’t ring true; it rings hollow,” Sullivan said. “The government has never been concerned with acting expeditiously here.”

Mohammed’s habeas case was filed in U.S. District Court in 2005, about six months after he arrived at Guantanamo Bay. The government has been fiercely fighting scores of similar lawsuits filed in federal court by detainees at the facility challenging their confinement.

Besides obtaining government documents, Katznelson is also trying to interview a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay who resigned citing ethical concerns; an FBI agent who investigated the dirty-bomb plot; and a suspected CIA operative who was on the flight that the defense says took Mohammed from Morocco to Afghanistan in 2004.

Sullivan set a hearing for Nov. 12 to hear Katznelson’s request.

Add comment November 1st, 2008

Jawad confession inadmissable

Major Frakt at Guantanamo has had a busy day. After the previous posting I heard that the judge in the trial of Mohammed Jawad has ruled that the main evidence against Jawad, a confession given to Afghan police, was extracted under torture and is therefore inadmissable as evidence. While this doesn’t automatically lead to dismissal of the war crimes charges, it is hard to see how the prosecution can continue.

Here is a Reuters report:

Guantanamo man tortured into confessing: U.S. judge

By Jane Sutton

GUANTANAMO BAY U.S. NAVAL BASE, Cuba (Reuters) – A young Guantanamo prisoner’s confession to Afghan police was obtained through torture and cannot be used as evidence in his trial on charges of wounding U.S. soldiers with a grenade, a judge in the U.S. war crimes court ruled on Tuesday.

High-ranking Afghan government officials threatened to kill Mohammed Jawad and his family unless he admitted throwing the grenade that wounded the soldiers and their Afghan interpreter at a bazaar in Kabul in December 2002, the judge found.

Jawad was 16 or 17 at the time and appeared to have been drugged, said the judge, Army Col. Stephen Henley. The Afghan officials who interrogated Jawad at the Kabul police station were armed and the death threat was credible, he ruled.

Jawad was turned over to U.S. forces after confessing and, two months later, was sent to the detention center at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The judge ruled that extracting a confession under threat of death met the definition of torture under the Guantanamo trial rules — an “act specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain and suffering.”

Trial rules allow the use of evidence obtained via coercion but not torture and leave it up to the individual judges to determine which is which.

“While the torture threshold is admittedly high, it is met in this case,” Henley said in his ruling.

The ruling casts further doubt on the wobbly case against Jawad, who is scheduled for trial at Guantanamo on January 5.

The military prosecutor in the case quit last month, alleging the U.S. government was suppressing evidence that cast doubt on Jawad’s guilt. And a U.S. general who supervised the prosecutors was reassigned after fellow officers accused him of pushing for charges in the Jawad case prematurely because he felt it would excite the interest of U.S. citizens.

Jawad’s military lawyer, Air Force Maj. David Frakt, said the suppressed evidence indicated Jawad was drugged by Afghans who recruited him for a purported mine-clearing operation and that he was one of three people who confessed to throwing the same grenade.

At a hearing in August, he presented testimony that Jawad was beaten and chained to the wall while in U.S. custody in Afghanistan then subjected to extreme isolation and sleep deprivation at Guantanamo even after the sleep deprivation program was ordered halted.

About 255 suspected members of al Qaeda, the Taliban and associated groups are now detained at Guantanamo. A total of more than 750 foreigners have been held without trial at the base in the seven years since President George W. Bush began a war against terrorism.

The two candidates for the U.S. presidential election on November 4 — Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain — have said they will close the Guantanamo prison, which is widely seen as a stain on the reputation of the United States.

Add comment October 28th, 2008

Petition for dropping charges against “child soldier” Mohammad Jawad

UPDATE: Maj. Frakt informs me that he is getting very few letters in support of Jawad. Please, please, please write a letter today. Also sign the petition, but the letters are much more important. Go here for instructions on writing an effective letter.

*************

Mohammad Jawad — arrested when he was 16 or 17 on highly questionable charges of throwing a grenade at US troops — has been imprisoned at Guantanamo for 5 1/2 years. Now he is up on war crimes charges. His defense attorney, Maj. David Frakt, last week asked supporters to write letters to the Military Commission Convening Authority requesting her to drop the charges against Jawad. Now Maj. Frakt is supplementing this letter-writting campaign with a petition. So please write a letter [more information and instructions here] and sign the petition.

Here is the text of the Petition:

Support Defense Request for Guantanamo Detainee Mohammad Jawad

Target: The Honorable Susan J. Crawford, Convening Authority of the Military Commissions
Sponsored by: Major David J. R. Frakt, Detailed Defense Counsel, Guantanamo Commission

WHEREAS,

1. Significant doubt exists about Mohammad Jawad’s culpability for the grenade attack on U.S. forces on December 17, 2002, in Kabul, Afghanistan;

2. Mohammad Jawad was a juvenile, only 16 or 17 years old, at the time he was taken into U.S. military custody on December 17, 2002;

3. Mohammad Jawad was subjected to extreme and illegal physical and psychological abuse at Bagram Air Base prison from December 18, 2002 to February 6, 2003, including, but not limited to, sleep deprivation, prolonged stress positions, threats, beatings, and being chained to the wall;

4.  Mohammad Jawad has been subjected to extreme and illegal physical and psychological abuse at Guantanamo Bay from February 6, 2008, including, but not limited to, sleep deprivation, prolonged isolation, threats, beatings, temperature extremes, sensory deprivation and sensory overload;

5.  Mohammad Jawad has been consistently denied the rights accorded to him under the Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict and under the Geneva Prisoner of War Convention and Geneva Convention Common Article 3;

6.  Mohammad Jawad’s alleged act of throwing a hand grenade at lawful combatants in an armed conflict does not constitute a violation of the international law of war;

7.  Mohammad Jawad has been unlawfully denied any opportunities for rehabilitation and reintegration during his nearly 6 years of captivity;

8.  Mohammad Jawad is not affiliated in any way with the Taliban or Al Qaida, and is not alleged to have any involvement in any terrorist attacks and is not charged with any crimes of terrorism;

9.  The United States has consistently opposed trying child soldiers as war criminals, and there is no mention in the entire legislative history of the Military Commissions Act by a single member of Congress of 2006 of any intent to try juvenile combatants or child soldiers; no juvenile or child soldier has ever been tried in an international war crimes tribunal for war crimes in modern history;

10.  It is our view that the Military Commissions Act of 2006 was intended to provide a vehicle to bring to justice those persons responsible for major terrorist attacks on the United States and its allies, such as the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the bombing of U.S. Embassies in East Africa;

THEREFORE, we concerned citizens implore you to reconsider your earlier decision to refer charges against Mohammad Jawad to trial by military commission and urge you to withdraw and permanently dismiss those charges.

Now go sign!

[Blogger Valtin at Invictus has also written about this petition.]

4 comments August 27th, 2008

Globe Op Ed: Ending the psychological mind games on detainees

I have a Op Ed in the Boston Globe today:

Ending the psychological mind games on detainees

By Stephen Soldz

WHEN MOST people think of psychologists, they think of a professional helping them with life’s emotional difficulties, or of a researcher studying human or animal behavior. Since the Bush administration and the war on terrorism have transformed our country, however, a new, more ominous image of psychologists has slowly seeped into public consciousness.

Psychologists have been identified as key figures in the design and conduct of abuses against detainees in US custody at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA’s secret “black sites,” and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Psychologists should not be taking part in such practices.

Yet a steady stream of revelations from government documents, journalistic reports, and congressional hearings has revealed that psychologists designed the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” techniques, which included locking prisoners in tiny cages in the fetal position, throwing them against the wall head first, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, and waterboarding.

Jane Mayer, in her new book, “The Dark Side,” reports that the central idea was the psychological concept of “learned helplessness.” Individuals are denied all control over their world, lose their will, and become totally dependent upon their captors.

At Guantanamo, the Red Cross described a system of psychological abuse as “tantamount to torture.” Psychologists, and some psychiatrists, helped interrogators “break down” detainees by exploiting information in their medical records. Thus, someone with an intense fear of dogs would be threatened with snarling dogs, while a person with a fear of being buried alive might be threatened with being sealed in a coffin.

When reports of these abuses surfaced, we psychologists looked to our largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association, to take the lead in condemning them and taking measures to ensure that they would not recur. After all, these actions by psychologists violate the central principle of the APA’s ethics code: “Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm.”

The APA, however, failed to take clear action. While the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association quickly and unequivocally condemned any involvement by its membership in such activities, APA leaders quibbled over whether psychologists had been present at the interrogations and questioned the motives of internal critics.

When the leadership appointed a task force on the ethics of psychologist involvement in interrogations, the report was strangely unsigned, and the members’ names were kept secret from APA members and the media. Finally, it was revealed that a majority of members were from the military-intelligence establishment, with four having served in chains of commands implicated in detainee abuses. Three of the four nonmilitary members have since denounced the task force process and two have called for the report to be rescinded.

The APA has since passed several antitorture resolutions - all of them full of loopholes - but has failed to take ethics enforcement action against a single psychologist for participating in abuses, despite publication two years ago of a detailed interrogation log showing the participation of a military psychologist in the abuse amounting to torture of a Guantanamo detainee.

Not surprisingly, unrest among APA members is growing. Many members, including the founder of the APA’s Practice Directorate and the former head of its Ethics Committee, have resigned in protest.

This month, ballots went out for a first-ever referendum to call a halt to psychologist participation in sites where international law is violated. And dissident New York psychologist Steven Reisner, a founder of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, is running for the APA presidency. His principal campaign platform is for psychologists to be banned from participating in interrogations at US military detention centers, like Guantanamo Bay, that violate human rights and function outside of the Geneva Conventions. In the nomination phase Reisner received the most votes of the five candidates.

At our annual convention in Boston this month, other APA members and I will rally against association policies encouraging participation in detainee interrogations. We will be joined by community activists, human rights groups, and civil libertarians to demand that APA return to its fundamental principle of “Do no harm.” Psychologists owe it to their profession and to the cause of human rights to oppose abuses, not participate in them.

Stephen Soldz, psychologist and psychoanalyst, is professor and director of the Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development at the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

1 comment August 10th, 2008

Two Jane Mayer interviews: Letterman and Moyers

Jane Mayer interviewed on Letterman:

Mayer was also interviewed by Bill Moyers. You can read the transcript here or watch here.

Add comment July 26th, 2008

American “justice,” NOT, says UN Special Rapporteu

The UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial, Summary and Arbitrary Executions has denounced many aspects of US justice, both at home, at Guantanamo, and in occupied Iraq Afghanistan:

UN envoy rips US violations in Iraq, Guantanamo, Afghanistan
Rapporteur condemns rights abuses at home, too

By Thalif Deen

Inter Press Service

UNITED NATIONS: After a two-week fact-finding tour of US prison and detention facilities, a UN human rights investigator has blasted the administration of President George W. Bush for a rash of shortcomings in the country’s flawed justice system and continued violations of the rule of law.

Unleashing a stinging barrage of attacks, Professor Philip Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extra-judicial, summary and arbitrary executions, singles out the existence of racism in the application of the death penalty in the United States, and the lack of transparency in the deaths of prisoners in the Guantanamo Bay detention facility housing suspected terrorists.

Alston, a professor at the New York University School of Law and an outspoken critic of human rights abuses worldwide, also complains about the non-availability of information on civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the refusal of the US Justice Department to prosecute private security contractors who commit unlawful killings.

During his 14-day tour of the United States at the invitation of the administration, he met with federal and state officials, judges and civil society groups in New York, Washington DC, Alabama and Texas.

Alston was particularly critical of the state of Texas which has refused to review the cases of foreign nationals on death row, most of whom had been deprived of the right to consular assistance from their home countries.

He specifically chose to visit Alabama “because it has the highest per capita rate of executions in the United States, and Texas because it has the largest number of executions and prisoners on death row.” Still, 129 individuals waiting on death row have been exonerated across the United States, since 1973, and the number continues to grow.

“Indeed, while I was in Texas, the conviction of yet another person on death row was overturned by the Court of Criminal Appeals,” Alston said.

While in this case DNA testing ultimately prevented the execution of an innocent man, Alston said, others may have been less fortunate.

“In Texas, I met a range of officials and others who acknowledged that innocent people might have been executed,” he said, adding the problem is that a criminal justice system with recognized flaws that the government refuses to address will always be capable of mistakes.

In his report, Alston points out that studies across the United States also suggest racial disparities in the application of the death penalty. In particular, many studies suggest that a defendant is more likely to receive the death penalty when the victim is white, and some studies also suggest that a defendant is more likely to receive the death penalty if he is African American.

“When I raised this issue with federal and state government officials, I was met with indifference or flat denial,” said Alston, who noted that many officials wrote off the results of studies showing racial disparity as being biased because they were written by researchers with anti-death penalty views. “Given what is at stake, there is a need for governments at both the state and federal levels to revisit systematically the concerns about continuing racial disparities,” he added.

Meanwhile, to date, just six of the “enemy combatants” detained at the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba have been charged with capital offenses under the Military Commissions Act (MCA). They are being tried before military commissions on war crimes charges, and if convicted, face the death penalty. According to Alston, the United States has an obligation to provide fair trials which afford all essential judicial guarantees.

“The fundamental principles of a fair trial may never be derogated from. But the text of the MCA, which provides the rules which govern the trials, and the experiences of those with whom I met during my mission involved in the trial process to date, indicate clearly that these trials utterly fail to meet the basic due process standards required for a fair trial under international humanitarian and human rights law,” he said.

There have been five reported deaths of detainees at Guantanamo Bay in 2006-07. Four were classified as suicides, and one was attributed to cancer. In the custodial environment, Alston said, a state has a heightened duty and capacity to ensure and respect the right to life. As a result, there is a rebuttable presumption of state responsibility whether through acts of commission or omission in cases of custodial death. The state has an obligation to investigate the deaths, and publicly report on the findings and the evidence upon which the findings are based.

“But the Department of Defense has provided little public information about the causes or circumstance of any of these deaths,” he said.

While it has been reported that autopsies were conducted in each case, the results have not been made public or even provided to the families of the deceased men, he added. It was also reported that the Naval Criminal Investigative Services is conducting investigations into each of the deaths. But over two years since the first deaths, no results of investigations have been released.

In Iraq and Afghanistan, where the US military is considered an occupying power, Alston points to a string of human rights abuses and violations of the rule of law.

The “troublingly opaque character of the US military justice system is well illustrated by a case described to me by witnesses and investigators when I visited Afghanistan,” he said. On March 4, 2007, he recalled, US Marines responded to a suicide attack on their convoy, in which one soldier was wounded, by killing 19 people and wounding many others in the space of a 10-mile retreat.

“I asked the regional commander in Afghanistan what follow-up had occurred. He could not tell me and explained that his unit had just arrived in Afghanistan and that accountability for incidents involving the previous unit was its responsibility and that it had taken all the relevant files when it left the country,” Alston said.

In fact, a Court of Inquiry into the incident proceeded in North Carolina: “Shortly after I returned from Afghanistan, the US military released a short statement on this incident indicating that the commander of US Marine Corps Forces Central Command had conducted a thorough review of the report of a Court of Inquiry and had determined that the soldiers had acted appropriately and in accordance with the rules of engagement and tactics, techniques and procedures in place at the time in response to a complex attack.” Unsurprisingly, he added, this conclusive and unsubstantiated response to such a serious incident was met with dismay in Afghanistan.

“Afghans and Americans have a right to ask on what basis this conclusion was reached,” Alston said. “But all of the documents produced by the Court of Inquiry have remained classified. The record of proceedings has not been released. The 12,000 page report of the Court of Inquiry including recommendations and factual findings has not been released.”

The US government has even disregarded the existing regulation stating that the convening authority should ensure that an executive summary of the report be made public in order to inform government officials, the legislative branch, the media, and the next of kin of the victims of the investigations findings and recommendations.

“Whether or not the decision not to initiate courts-martial was justified, the manner in which the military justice system has operated in this case is entirely inconsistent with principles of public accountability and transparency,” Alston declared.

Regarding killings by private security contractors, he said: “It’s the [US] Department of Justice’s job to prosecute private security contractors who commit unlawful killings, but it has done next to nothing.”

1 comment July 3rd, 2008

New rumor that Bush may close GTMO

Periodically there are rumors that the Bush administration is about to close Guantanamo. ABC News is reporting the latest version, based on the fact that the Government’s evidence-free claims that prisoners are “enemy combatants” won’t hold wen the prisoners get access to the courts :

Bush to Close Guantanamo?

By Jan Crawford Greenburg

July 02, 2008 7:06 PM

President Bush will soon decide whether to close Guantanamo Bay as a prison for al-Qaeda suspects, sources tell ABC News. High-level discussions among top advisers have escalated in the past week, with the most senior administration officials in continuous talks about the future of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay–and how it will be dramatically changed and/or closed in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling that gave detainees there access to federal courts.

Sources have confirmed that President Bush is expected to be briefed on these pressing GTMO issues–and may reach a decision on the future of the naval base as a prison for al Qaeda suspects–before he leaves for the G8 on Saturday. An announcement, however, is not expected before he leaves the country.

High-level administration officials say the Court’s decision dramatically changes the legal landscape–and raises questions about whether the government has solid evidence to present to federal judges to justify ongoing detentions.

That evidence, much of it classified and obtained by military and CIA personnel on the battlefield, is not the standard kind of proof judges are accustomed to seeing in regular criminal cases here, administration officials say. The documents do not contain the kind of detail-or include sources of that information-that’s typical in criminal cases, sources say.

Late last month for example, a federal appeals court in Washington said the government failed to prove its case with one detainee from China. The administration fears that’s a sign of things to come-in light of the Supreme Court’s ruling giving other detainees even broader habeas corpus rights to challenge their detentions in court, sources tell ABC News.

Of course, there is generally wide agreement–from Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and even Bush himself–that GTMO should eventually be closed. But the Court ruling could well hasten that move, since it undercuts the main reason to keep the detainees there. A key reason for imprisoning the detainees at GTMO in the first place was the belief that they would not have access to the courts, since they were not on U.S. soil.

The recent discussions—which have involved numerous meetings with the most senior advisers to the President–the Principals–are about how to handle the some 260 detainees still imprisoned at GTMO. Should they be brought to the United States, and where, of course, to put them if they are to be imprisoned in this country?

Bush has not decided whether he will announce that GTMO should be closed, sources say. But at the very least, sources say, he will soon announce a host of these legal and policy changes that will force Congress to come up with a solution–including where to imprison those detainees if GTMO does, in fact, shut its doors.

Add comment July 3rd, 2008

New report documents medical consequences of and medical complicity with US torture

Physicians for Human Rights has just released an extremely important new report — Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact — involving extensive medical and psychological examinations of 11 detainees released from US detention facilities in Iraq and at Guantanamo. The report provides a detailed account of the brutality involved throughout the US detention system in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at Guantanamo.

These detainees were all brutally beaten and humiliated. All subjected to isolation. Several were sodomized while others were subjected to electric shocks. All the other “techniques” from the panoply of US torture techniques are represented here, including sleep deprivation; sensory deprivation; being subjected to loud noise; and “stress positions,”  including being suspended from the ceiling.

The report provides both medical evidence supporting torture claims, and evidence of the severe long-term effects of the abuse. The medical and psychological examinations in most cases substantiated detainees’ claims of abuse. Where the medical evidence was equivocal, it was largely due to types of injuries, e.g., soft tissue injuries, that would have healed in the meantime.

The report also provides abundant documentation of the extent of medical and psychological complicity with the torture. In no case did medical personnel report abuse. In many cases they patched up detainees to facilitate additional torture:

“[W]hen the doctor had finished treating him, “I heard the doctor say ‘continue’ (to the interrogators)”, p. 21.

The cases where medical personnel were “helpful” are just as disturbing:

““[The doctor] helped me … he told the soldiers, ‘If you go on torturing him in this way, he will die’,” p. 85.

Not surprisingly, detainees did not report psychologists consulting in interrogations (SOP called for these psychologists to not identify themselves, an interesting ethical issue in itself). But treatment psychologists were perceived to be collaborating with interrogators:

“Haydar indicated, however, that he suspected the psychologists shared information with the soldiers,” p. 48.

And:

“While in Camp Delta, Youssef asked to speak with a psychologist because he was distressed, and the two spoke about him missing his family and his feelings of sadness. Although Youssef believed the meeting was confidential, he stated that shortly after the psychologist left, he was brought to an interrogator who immediately brought up information connected to his disclosures, such as telling him that he was going to stay at Guantánamo for the rest of his life and discussing his family (“Don’t you want to leave this place and get back together with your family?”…If you do as we tell you, you can get back to your family.”). He stated, “I figured out the reason they had called me for the interrogation was because the psychologist had told them about the meeting.” He stated, “They were stressing these fears very much.” Following this interrogation, Youssef reported that he was moved to the “worst” section in Camp Delta, where he was not allowed to have a blanket or a mattress,” p. 58

After the publication of this report, any claim that psychologists helped keep detentions or interrogations “safe or ethical” are completely unsupportable. Psychologists, and indeed, all medical personnel, regardless of their personal characteristics, were simply part of the apparatus of abuse. As Maj. Gen. Taguba — who was driven out of the military because of his Abu Ghraib investigation– states in his preface:

“And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.”

If we do not stop this complicity, we thereby ourselves become complicit. After this report, we can no longer say “We didn’t know. We thought they were helping.”

Below are two PHR Press Releases and the Preface by Gen. Taguba.

Medical Evidence Supports Detainees’ Accounts of Torture in US Custody

Cambridge, Mass. (PRWEB) June 18, 2008 — Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has published a landmark report documenting medical evidence of torture and ill-treatment inflicted on 11 men detained at US facilities in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay, who were never charged with any crime. The physical and psychological evaluation of the detainees and documentation of the crimes are based on internationally accepted standards for clinical assessment of torture claims. The report also details the severe physical and psychological pain and long-term disability that has resulted from abusive and unlawful US interrogation practices.

“Rigorous clinical evaluations confirm the enormous and enduring toll of agony and anguish inflicted for months by US personnel on eleven men who were detained without any charge or explanation,” stated PHR President Leonard Rubenstein. “Their first-hand accounts, now confirmed by medical and psychological examinations, take us behind the photographs to write a missing chapter of America’s descent into the shameful practice and official policy of systematic torture.”

Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact documents practices used to bring about excruciating pain, terror, humiliation, and shame for months on end. These practices included, but were not limited to:

• Suspensions and other stress positions;
• Routine isolation;
• Sleep deprivation combined with sensory bombardment and temperature extremes;
• Sexual humiliation and forced nakedness;
• Sodomy;
• Beatings;
• Denial of medical care;
• Electric shock;
• Involuntary medication; and
• Threats to their lives and families.

In the foreword to the report, Maj. General Antonio Taguba (USA-Ret.), who led the U.S. Army’s investigation into the Abu Ghraib detainee abuse scandal, wrote: “After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

“Ending the use of torture, while essential, is not enough. The United States government must make this right. Those responsible for these abuses must help heal the grievous harm inflicted in our name,” said PHR CEO Frank Donaghue. “PHR is calling for full investigation, accountability, an official apology, and reparations, including medical and psychological treatment for the survivors.”

And:

US Torture of Detainees Caused Severe Pain, Long-Term Suffering

Cambridge, Mass. (PRWEB) June 18, 2008 - A team of doctors and psychologists convened by Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) to conduct intensive clinical evaluations of 11 former detainees held in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay has found that these men suffered torture and ill-treatment by US personnel, which resulted in severe pain and long-term disability. The men were ultimately released from US custody without charge or explanation.

“The horrific consequences of US detention and interrogation policy are indelibly written on the bodies and minds of the former detainees in scars, debilitating injuries, humiliating memories and haunting nightmares,” states Dr. Allen Keller, Director of the Bellevue/NYU Program for Survivors of Torture and a contributor to PHR’s report Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and Its Impact. “Physical and psychological evidence clearly supports the detainees’ first-hand accounts of cruelty, inhuman treatment, degradation, and torture.”

“The poignant case studies focus on the profound and lasting consequences of cruelty at the hands of US personnel,” said Farnoosh Hashemian, MPH, PHR Research Associate and lead author of the report. “The detainees suffer permanent hearing loss, persistent and debilitating pain in limbs and joints, major depressive disorder, severe post-traumatic stress disorder, and anxiety disorders, such as panic attacks.”

One Iraqi detainee, Laith, recounted that during his initial detention in an unknown prison, he was brutally beaten and kicked until he lost consciousness. In Abu Ghraib, he was kept naked for almost a month in a variety of stress positions in isolation in a small, dark cell wearing soiled underwear and was subjected to lengthy interrogations.

On one occasion he was brought to see his brother who was bleeding, naked, and humiliated. The most painful experience for Laith was the threat of rape of his mother and sisters: “They were saying, ‘you will hear your mothers and sisters when we are raping them [here].’”

These men also continue to endure profound disruptions in their social and family lives. Many live with an abiding sense of shame caused by the loss of their ability to protect and provide for their families. And several men told medical evaluators of their desire to relocate, stemming from their loss of a sense of safety, since they had been arrested without charge or to avoid the frequent reminders of their harrowing detention experiences.

The report calls for full investigation and remedies, including accountability for war crimes, and reparation, such as compensation, medical care and psycho-social services.

Here is the preface :

Preface

by General AntonioTaguba [Ret]

This report tells the largely untold human story of what happened to detainees in our custody when the Commander-in-Chief and those under him authorized a systematic regime of torture. This story is not only written in words: It is scrawled for the rest of these individual’s lives on their bodies and minds. Our national honor is stained by the indignity and inhumane treatment these men received from their captors.

The profiles of these eleven former detainees, none of whom were ever charged with a crime or told why they were detained, are tragic and brutal rebuttals to those who claim that torture is ever justified. Through the experiences of these men in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, we can see the full-scope of the damage this illegal and unsound policy has inflicted —both on America’s institutions and our nation’s founding values, which the military, intelligence services, and our justice system are duty-bound to defend.

In order for these individuals to suffer the wanton cruelty to which they were subjected, a government policy was promulgated to the field whereby the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice were disregarded. The UN Convention Against Torture was indiscriminately ignored. And the healing professions, including physicians and psychologists, became complicit in the willful infliction of harm against those the Hippocratic Oath demands they protect.

After years of disclosures by government investigations, media accounts, and reports from human rights organizations, there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.

The former detainees in this report, each of whom is fighting a lonely and difficult battle to rebuild his life, require reparations for what they endured, comprehensive psycho-social and medical assistance, and even an official apology from our government.

But most of all, these men deserve justice as required under the tenets of international law and the United States Constitution.

And so do the American people.

Major General Antonio Taguba, USA (Ret.)

Maj. General Taguba led the US Army’s official investigation into the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and testified before Congress on his findings in May, 2004.

Go download and read the report here.

4 comments June 18th, 2008

A drugged army is a more reliable army

Meanwhile, te soldiers who are in Iraq and Afghanistan are taking psychoactive drugs, primarily antidepressants and sleeping medications, in order to cope:

Data contained in the Army’s fifth Mental Health Advisory Team report indicate that, according to an anonymous survey of U.S. troops taken last fall, about 12% of combat troops in Iraq and 17% of those in Afghanistan are taking prescription antidepressants or sleeping pills to help them cope. Escalating violence in Afghanistan and the more isolated mission have driven troops to rely more on medication there than in Iraq, military officials say.

At a Pentagon that keeps statistics on just about everything, there is no central clearinghouse for this kind of data, and the Army hasn’t consistently asked about prescription-drug use, which makes it difficult to track. Given the traditional stigma associated with soldiers seeking mental help, the survey, released in March, probably underestimates antidepressant use. But if the Army numbers reflect those of other services — the Army has by far the most troops deployed to the war zones — about 20,000 troops in Afghanistan and Iraq were on such medications last fall. The Army estimates that authorized drug use splits roughly fifty-fifty between troops taking antidepressants — largely the class of drugs that includes Prozac and Zoloft — and those taking prescription sleeping pills like Ambien.

The extensive use of psychotropics may enable the military to keep more troops in the field longer, at the cost of more mental disorders long-term:

“No magic pill can erase the image of a best friend’s shattered body or assuage the guilt from having traded duty with him that day,” says Combat Stress Injury, a 2006 medical book edited by Charles Figley and William Nash that details how troops can be helped by such drugs. “Medication can, however, alleviate some debilitating and nearly intolerable symptoms of combat and operational stress injuries” and “help restore personnel to full functioning capacity.”

Which means that any drug that keeps a soldier deployed and fighting also saves money on training and deploying replacements. But there is a downside: the number of soldiers requiring long-term mental-health services soars with repeated deployments and lengthy combat tours. If troops do not get sufficient time away from combat — both while in theater and during the “dwell time” at home before they go back to war — it’s possible that antidepressants and sleeping aids will be used to stretch an already taut force even tighter. “This is what happens when you try to fight a long war with an army that wasn’t designed for a long war,” says Lawrence Korb, Pentagon personnel chief during the Reagan Administration.

Not everyone is fooled:

Military families wonder about the change, according to Joyce Raezer of the private National Military Family Association. “Boy, it’s really nice to have these drugs,” she recalls a military doctor saying, “so we can keep people deployed.” And professionals have their doubts. “Are we trying to bandage up what is essentially an insufficient fighting force?” asks Dr. Frank Ochberg, a veteran psychiatrist and founding board member of the International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies.

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