Tag Archives: CIA

Yoo & Obama’s Justice

Posted on by elizabeth
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OMG I can’t believe I missed this!  John Yoo still can’t shut up about his huge desire to place people outside the reach of the rule of law.  You’d think he’d be trying to keep a low profile these days.  But no …

The CIA must now conduct interrogations according to the rules of the Army Field Manual, which prohibits coercive techniques, threats and promises, and the good-cop bad-cop routines used in police stations throughout America. Mr. Obama has also ordered that al Qaeda leaders are to be protected from “outrages on personal dignity” and “humiliating and degrading treatment” in accord with the Geneva Conventions. His new order amounts to requiring — on penalty of prosecution — that CIA interrogators be polite. Coercive measures are unwisely banned with no exceptions, regardless of the danger confronting the country.

Eliminating the Bush system will mean that we will get no more information from captured al Qaeda terrorists. Every prisoner will have the right to a lawyer (which they will surely demand), the right to remain silent, and the right to a speedy trial.

The first thing any lawyer will do is tell his clients to shut up. The KSMs or Abu Zubaydahs of the future will respond to no verbal questioning or trickery — which is precisely why the Bush administration felt compelled to use more coercive measures in the first place. Our soldiers and agents in the field will have to run more risks as they must secure physical evidence at the point of capture and maintain a chain of custody that will stand up to the standards of a civilian court.

Relying on the civilian justice system not only robs us of the most effective intelligence tool to avert future attacks, it provides an opportunity for our enemies to obtain intelligence on us. If terrorists are now to be treated as ordinary criminals, their defense lawyers will insist that the government produce in open court all U.S. intelligence on their client along with the methods used by the CIA and NSA to get it. A defendant’s constitutional right to demand the government’s files often forces prosecutors to offer plea bargains to spies rather than risk disclosure of intelligence secrets.  [oh no, more]

If there was ever any doubt that John Yoo thinks it’s a great idea to torture detainees, it should be laid forever to rest:  “Coercive measures are unwisely banned with no exceptions, regardless of the danger confronting the country.”

Shorter John Yoo:  Oh NO, we can’t torture people, no exceptions, whatever will we do …?  The right to a lawyer, the right to silence and the right to a speedy trial for all?  What the fuck?  Rule of law you say?  Never heard of it.  Same goes for the Geneva Conventions.  That’s only for other folks.  They don’t apply to us …  If we get attacked it will be because of Barack!

Very Funny?

Posted on by elizabeth
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Digby on the CIA’s use of Viagra to bribe Afghan warlords:

We barge into foreign societies without a coherent understanding of the underlying culture and try to use whatever means to get the locals on our side, and the unintended consequences that result are never examined either before or after the fact. They are considered prices to be paid for “success,” whatever that means. I think it’s actually fairly impossible for me to determine the full effects of giving Viagra to Afghan warlords, in much the way that introducing a change in where a butterfly flaps its wings in the past can alter the future. But I’m fairly certain that those effects are completely ignored by the elites who think they can control events thousands of miles away through little inducements and bribes. I haven’t read all of Legacy of Ashes but I wonder if I’d find anything if I searched the index for the part where anyone games out the ripple effects of the agency’s actions. Probably not.

Maybe what should be considered, instead of the boner pills, is why we’re in Afghanistan in the first place. Rather than social engineering, we could use local law enforcement and intelligence sharing to limit or remove the capacity of anyone in the region striking beyond their borders, and we allow local and regional actors to determine their own way forward instead of arrogantly assuming we know what’s best for these people, and trying to install a central democracy where none has ever existed. Alternatively, we could figure out what other drugs they might like.

Read the whole post here

Obama, “Change” & Torture USA

Posted on by elizabeth
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From Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

While virtually all of the Bush agenda over the last eight years ended up being deeply unpopular and profoundly discredited, it was his foreign policy and intelligence programs (torture, rendition, illegal surveillance, war) which caused the most intense opposition, at least among Democratic voters.  That is a large part of why Democrats just won their second straight national election promising to oppose Bush’s policies and to implement “change.”  It was the policies implemented and overseen by Bush’s Pentagon, CIA and “homeland security” apparatus that caused the most disgrace.  “Continuity” in those areas would be nothing less than a patent betrayal of everything Democrats, over the last two years, told the citizenry they intended to do.

And yet, having watched Obama already announce that he is retaining Bush’s Defense Secretary, here we have the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee also urging that Obama keep, for “at least” six months, Bush’s handpicked Director of National Intelligence (whom Democrats excoriated during the FISA debates for manipulating and, as even Reyes himself noted, outright lying to them) and Bush’s handpicked CIA Director (who was, as Obama himself said, the “architect and chief defender” of Bush’s illegal NSA spying programs).  Even worse, Reyes is publicly urging that Obama maintain, rather than overhaul, “some parts of the CIA’s controversial alternative interrogation program” — or else we’ll all be slaughtered by the Terrorists.

Read the whole thing here

Rule of Law & Heads of State

Posted on by elizabeth
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From Peter Erlinder at Jurist:

Earlier this month, “Chuckie Taylor”, the son of former Liberian President Charles Taylor, now facing trial at The Hague, became the first US citizen in history to be convicted under 18 USC §2340-2340A, a 1994 federal statute that criminalizes violations of the Convention Against Torture by any US citizen, anywhere in the world.[1] The Bush Justice Department was successful in arguing the constitutionality of §2340A and its applicability to a US citizen for crimes committed in Liberia between 1999 and 2003.
Ironically, this overlaps with the period during which the Bush executive branch itself was engaging in what the CIA’s George Tenet euphemistically called “enhanced interrogation techniques” in secret CIA overseas prisons and in places like Abu Ghraib and Guantamo. The CIA apparently adopted “waterboarding” and other “torture” tactics when their first high-level captive refused to cooperate in late 2001 or early 2002 [2], and the “torture stain” began to spread to other executive-branch services.   [more]

More Torture?

Posted on by elizabeth
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From Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

[Sen Dianne] Feinstein and [Sen Ron] Wyden are just two of the “senior Democratic lawmakers” who have “seemed reluctant in recent interviews to commit the new administration to following the Army Field Manual in all cases” — despite the fact that both Feinstein and Wyden said throughout the year that they emphatically favored such a measure and even co-sponsored legislation requiring it.

From the Times article:  “in an interview on Tuesday, Mrs. Feinstein indicated that extreme cases might call for flexibility.”  And:  “‘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.”  Wyden’s comments were even worse:  

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, another top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said he would consult with the C.I.A. and approve interrogation techniques that went beyond the Army Field Manual as long as they were “legal, humane and noncoercive.”  But Mr. Wyden declined to say whether C.I.A. techniques ought to be made public.

What makes this so notable is that, for the last year, Feinstein and Wyden were both insistent that the only way to end torture and restore America’s standing in the world was to require CIA compliance with the Army Field Manual — period.  But as long as George Bush was President, it was cheap and easy for Feinstein and Wyden to argue that, because they knew there was no chance it would ever happen.  As they well knew, they lacked the votes to override Bush’s inevitable veto of any such legislation.  So as long as Bush was President, it was all just posturing, strutting around demanding absolute anti-torture legislation they knew would never pass.  

Read the rest here

Emotional Torture

Posted on by elizabeth
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When psychologists teach torture:

[…]

The issues of psychologist involvement in “national security” efforts are complex. Although there may be appropriate and ethically acceptable ways for psychologists to participate in such activities, even a cursory historical awareness indicates that such involvement is often ethically problematic. Whether for good or for ill, the CIA has a long record of tapping academic scientists as witting and unwitting consultants and researchers, and of providing protection through cover stories and secrecy. For example, the 1977 Senate investigation of the CIA Behavioral Modification Project (called MKULTRA) disclosed that the CIA had contracted with researchers at over 80 universities, hospitals, and other research-based institutions through a front funding agency. In the Senate hearing, the Director of Central Intelligence stated: “I believe we all owe a moral obligation to these researchers and institutions to protect them from any unjustified embarrassment or damage to their reputations which revelations of their identities might bring.”i But these are not just ploys of the past. Recently, Dr. Belinda Canton, a long-time CIA intelligence manager and a member of the 2005 President’s Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, recommended opportunistic use of scientists as an approach to management of uncertainty: “Identify academics and scientists who may have insights” and note where “opportunities exist to exploit scientific cadre.”ii

This history, along with the current, well-documented authorizations for detainee abuse, should have provided sufficient warning to APA leaders and to individual psychologists about the moral risks in aiding the national security apparatus, especially under the present U.S. administration. But the APA has not taken the lead in helping psychologists confront these dangerous ethical situations. To the contrary, the APA has been insensitive to the use of psychological techniques in torture and to the role of psychologists in aiding that torture. This insensitivity itself has shocked many psychologists here and abroad.

In 2006, Time magazine released the interrogation log of Guantanamo detainee 063, Mohammed al-Qahtani. This log demonstrated that al-Qahtani had been systematically tortured for six weeks in late 2002 and 2003. The log also alleged that psychologist and APA member Maj. John Leso was present at least several times during these episodes. The APA said nothing about this alleged participation of an APA member in documented torture. It is at least 23 months since ethics complaints were filed against Dr. Leso and still the APA has remained silent.

In May 2007, the Defense Department declassified the Office of Inspector General report, documenting the role of SERE psychologists in training military and CIA personnel in techniques of abuse that “violated the Geneva Conventions.” The APA responded with silence. When we inquired about the APA’s reaction, we were told that the organization needed time to “carefully study” the report. It has been 14 months, and to date no APA leader has commented upon the Report.

The APA leadership has failed psychologists and failed the profession of psychology. It has also failed the country. When ethical guidance was required, the APA put its ethical authority in the hands of those involved in the questionable practices that needed investigation. When the evidence became overwhelming that psychologists helped design, implement, and standardize a U.S. torture regime, the APA remained silent. When it was reported that the use of psychological paradigms such as ‘learned helplessness’ have guided psychologists’ manipulation of detainee conditions, the APA continues to ignore or discount these reports. They instead assert that psychologists presence’ at CIA black sites and detention camps “assures safety.” When it became clear that the APA should offer a strong voice and a clear policy prohibiting psychologists’ participation in operations that systematically violate the Geneva conventions and international law, the APA leadership raised concern that a “restraint of trade” lawsuit might be brought against them. These arguments, of course, do not pass the red face test in any discerning forum of world opinion.

[…]

Read the whole article here

Kafka in Guantanamo

Posted on by elizabeth
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The ancient history of our people records terrible forms of punishment. This does not, however, imply anything in defense of the present penal code.

– Franz Kafka

From the LA Times:

Guantanamo Bay, Cuba

The name of the Central Intelligence Agency cannot be spoken in the war crimes trial here.

No records of the agency’s interrogations of Salim Ahmed Hamdan can be subpoenaed, and no agent can be called to testify about what he or she learned from Osama bin Laden’s former driver.

When defense attorney Harry H. Schneider Jr. attempted to demonstrate how many interrogations Hamdan had undergone in the months after his November 2001 arrest — at least 40 — he couldn’t list the CIA along with more than a dozen other agencies including the Secret Service and what was then known as the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

The prohibition against naming the CIA came in a “protective order” issued by the court at the government’s request. The tribunal’s deputy chief prosecutor, Army Col. Bruce A. Pagel, couldn’t say which agency sought the shield or what arguments were made to justify it.

“It’s a bit absurd to go through an entire trial pretending that the CIA doesn’t exist,” said Matt Pollard, a legal advisor for Amnesty International here to monitor the proceedings.

American Imperialism & Obama

Posted on by elizabeth
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Robert Lovato at Alternet:

Just a week before Barack Obama’s highly anticipated first tour of Europe and the Middle East as presidential candidate, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria asked the Senator about the kinds of experiences that will inform his ability to occupy the most powerful foreign policy position on earth.

” … what is your first memory of a foreign policy event that shaped you, shaped your life?” asked Zakaria. Obama invoked his childhood memories of Indonesia, where his mother worked for the U.S. embassy in Jakarta. And he did so with the poise that will ultimately vanquish the manufactured image of him as the Islamic garb-wearing threat depicted in political cartoons. With facial expressions and body language that made him look like the embodiment of sensitive, flexible yet tough cosmopolitanism, a very pensive and presidential-sounding Obama told Zakaria that he later learned that Indonesia fell victim to “an enormous coup, the military coup in which we learned later that over half-a-million people had probably died.”

Most striking, Obama said, was how “the generals in Indonesia or members of Suharto’s (who led the coup and ruled Indonesia for over 30 years) family were living in lavish mansions, and the sense that government wasn’t always working for the people, but was working for insiders, — not that that didn’t happen in the United States,” he added, “but at least the sense that there was a civil society and rules of law that had to be abided by.” Obama’s interview previewed the kind glamour and intelligence will help CNN reach American Idol in the ratings game while also positioning him to compete in the Great Game of geopolitics.

But as eloquent, smart and unMcCain-like as Obama sounded during the interview, his pre-foreign policy tour paean to U.S. civil society lacked any mention of how of the U.S. government was “working for the people” when its military aid paid for those Indonesian mansions in the late 1960’s. Neither did his response to Zakaria mention what the U.S government did to enable one of the worst slaughters of the late 20th century: providing training to 1,200 of those generals and other Indonesian military officers and giving them the money, arms, intelligence and political support that caused catastrophic trauma. As a smart and sensitive boy who played soccer on Jakarta’s dusty Haji Ramli Street, Obama surely felt this trauma among his friends and families devastated by state-sponsored terrorism and mass murder.

Nor did Obama mention in his interview the strategies in support of the military coup planned and executed out of the same embassy where his mother worked as an English teacher.

When asked by a reporter in 1990 about dissident lists prepared by the CIA and U.S. State Department and given to the Indonesian military during the coup, Robert J. Martens, a political attaché who worked at the embassy up until the year before Obama’s mother did, replied: “It really was a big help to the (Indonesian) army. They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that’s not all bad.”

While it’s absurd to expect Obama to account for the violence and militarism of the U.S. government of his childhood, it is imperative that we hold him accountable to stopping the violence and militarism of the government he’s preparing to lead as an adult.

Read the rest here

Is Afghanistan Burning?

Posted on by elizabeth
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More bad news from Afghanistan:

KABUL – A car bomb ripped through the front wall of the Indian Embassy in central Kabul on Monday, killing 40 people in the deadliest attack in Afghanistan’s capital since the fall of the Taliban, officials said.

The massive explosion detonated by a suicide bomber damaged two embassy vehicles entering the compound, near where dozens of Afghan men line up every morning to apply for visas.

The embassy is located on a busy, tree-lined street near Afghanistan’s Interior Ministry in the city centre. Several nearby shops were damaged or destroyed in the blast, and smouldering ruins covered the street. The explosion rattled much of the Afghan capital.

Shortly after the attack, a woman ran out of a Kabul hospital screaming, crying and hitting her face with both of her hands. Her two children, a girl named Lima and a boy named Mirwais, had been killed.

“Oh my God!” the woman screamed. “They are both dead.”

Najib Nikzad, an Interior Ministry spokesman, said the blast killed 40 people. Earlier, Abdullah Fahim, the spokesman for the Ministry of Public Health, said the explosion killed at least 28 people and wounded 141, but an update of the number of injured was not immediately available.

And Mike Whitney’s updated analysis on the situation in Afghanistan:

Far from being the “good war”, Afghanistan has turned out to be a brutal war of revenge. Three decades of fighting has left the country in ruins and the violence is only getting worse. As victory becomes more elusive, the US has stepped up its bombing campaign making 2008 the most deadly year on record. Civilian casualties have skyrocketed and millions of Afghans have become refugees. At the same time, the Taliban have regrouped and taken over strategically vital areas in the south disrupting US supply lines from Pakistan. Khost has fallen into the hands of the Afghan resistance just as it did before the Soviet Army was defeated in the 1980s. The Taliban are moving inexorably towards Kabul and a battle for the capital now seems unavoidable.For the second month in a row, the number of foreign troops killed in Afghanistan has exceeded Iraq. The fighting has intensified while security has steadily deteriorated. The Taliban’s numbers are growing, but the total allied commitment is still under 60,000 troops for a country of 32 million. This makes it impossible to capture and hold territory. The military is limited to “hit and run” operations. The ground belongs to the Taliban.

Michael Scheuer, former CIA chief of the Bin Laden Issue Station, made this statement at a recent conference at the Middle East Institute in Washington, DC: “Afghanistan is lost for the United States and its allies. To use Kipling’s term, ‘We are watching NATO bleed to death on the Afghan plains.’ But what are we going to do. There are 20 million Pashtuns; are we going to invade? We don’t have enough troops to even form a constabulary that would control the country. The disaster occurred at the beginning. The fools that run our country thought that a few hundreds CIA officers and a few hundred special forces officers could take a country the size of Texas and hold it, were quite literally fools. And now we are paying the price.”

 

 

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Via wood s lot