Posted December 13, 2007 | 03:55 PM (EST)
<snip>
What we are likely to see if the tapes documenting the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah and Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri are ever recovered is that the "confessions" of the prisoners upon which the White House has built its entire case for subverting the Constitution and suspending civil liberties in this country was obtained through methods such as electrocution, beating to the point of organ failure, hanging prisoners from the wrists from a ceiling, suffocation, and threats against family members ("I am going to find your mother and I am going to fuck her" is one direct quote from a US interrogator). On the missing tapes, we would likely see responses from the prisoners that would be obvious to us as confessions to anything at all in order to end the violence. In other words, if we could witness the drama of manufacturing by torture the many violently coerced "confessions" upon which the whole house of cards of this White House and its hyped "war on terror" rests, it would likely cause us to reopen every investigation, including the most serious ones (remember, even the 9/11 committee did not receive copies of the tapes); shut down the corrupt, Stalinesque Military Commissions System; turn over prisoners, the guilty and the innocent, into a working, accountable justice system operating in accordance with American values; and direct our legal scrutiny to the torturers themselves -- right up to the office of the Vice President and the President if that is where the investigations would lead.
By the way:
"The prohibition against torture is considered to be a jus cogens norm, meaning that no derogation is permitted from it under any circumstances."This is what the FOIA documents report, belying White House soundbites that "we don't torture" and explaining the intent pursuit on the part of the CIA and the White House of the current apparent obstruction of justice:
Late 2002 -- the FBI objects to the illegality of abuses being put into place by the Defense Department in its "special interrogation plan" to use isolation, sleep deprivation and menacing with dogs against prisoners.
Dec 2, 2002 -- Defense Secretary Rumsfeld personally issues a directive authorizing the use of stress positions, hooding, removal of clothing, and the terrorizing of inmates at Guantanamo with dogs.
Dec 3, 2002 -- at Baghram, interrogators kill an Afghan prisoner "by shackling him by his wrists to the wire ceiling above his cell and repeatedly beating his legs. A postmortem report finds abrasions and contusions on the prisoner's face, head, neck, arms and legs and determines that the death was a "homicide" caused by "blunt force injuries."
April 16, 2003 -- Rumsfeld approves yet another directive for abusive interrogation.
This directive for Afghanistan restores to the interrogators' arsenal many forms of torture that had been resisted by the FBI. (Notably, the FBI had resisted complying with the direct commission of torture since as early as 2002 because, as its Behavioral Analysis Unit complained to the Defense Department at that time in an internal email, "not only are these tactics at odds with legally permissible interviewing techniques (italics mine) in other words, all concerned know these are apparent war crimes)...but they are being employed by personnel in GTMO who have little, if any, experience eliciting information for judicial purposes." In other words, as any trained interrogator knows, the abuses are both doubtless illegal and certainly ineffective for getting real intelligence. (Jaffer and Singh, Timeline of Key Events, pp. 45-65,op. cit.)
Oct 22 2003 -- Final autopsy report relating to death of "52 y/o Iraqi Male, Civilian Detainee" held by U.S. forces in Nasiriyah, Iraq. Prisoner was found to have "died as a result of asphyxia...due to strangulation."
November 14, 2003 -- a sworn statement of a soldier stationed at Camp Red, Baghdad, states that "I saw what I think were war crimes" and that "the chain of command....allowed them to happen."
May 13, 2004 -- a sworn statement of the 302nd Military Intelligence Battalion recounts an incident in which "interrogators abused 17-year-old son of prisoner in order to 'break' the prisoner."
May 18, 2004 -- a Privacy Act statement of an Abu Ghraib sergeant notes that prisoners had been forced to stand "naked with a bag over their head, standing on MRE boxes and their hands(s) spread out...holding a bottle in each hand."
May 24, 2004 -- Sworn statement of interrogator who arrived at Abu Ghraib in October 2003, discussing use of military dogs against juvenile prisoners.
June 16, 2004 -- Marine Corps document describing abuse cases between September 2001 and June 2004, including "substantiated" incidents in which marines electrocuted a prisoner and set another's hands on fire.
Undated: Sworn statement of screener who arrived at Abu Ghraib in September 2003, indicating that prisoners at Asamiya Palace in Baghdad had been beaten, burned and subjected to electric shocks.
Subsequent internal documents record prisoners being stripped, made to walk into walls blindfolded, punched, kicked, dragged about the room, observed to have bruises and burn marks on their backs, and having their jaws deliberately broken. Still other reports document further incidents classified by the military itself as probable murders committed by US interrogators.
The book also reveals an extraordinary original transcript of a Dept. of the Army Inspector General interview with Lieutenant General Randall Marc Schmidt. Lt. Gen. Schmidt had interfaced with MG Geoffrey Miller on the one hand -- the most brutal overseer of such abuses, the one who was sent to "Gitmo-ize" other prisons -- and the honorable JAG military lawyers on the other hand, over the abuses under investigation at that time.
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<snip>
The transcript of this internal document reveals Lt. Gen. Schmidt's own words that it was his understanding that the directives to commit these acts, many of which are apparently war crimes, came right from the top.
The interview was not primarily intended to be a public document:
"An Inspector General" notes the document, "is an impartial fact-finder for the Directing Authority Testimony taken by an IG and reports based on that testimony may be used for official purposes. Access is normally restricted to persons who clearly need the information to perform their official duties. (italics mine). In some cases, disclosure to other persons may be required by law or regulation or may be directed by proper authority." As in the case, clearly, here -- though the immense implications of this privately taken testimony have not reverberated fully yet in a public forum: "I thought the Secretary of Defense in good faith was approving techniques," testified Lt. Gen. Schmidt. "In good faith after talking to him twice. I know that -- and these weren't interrogations or interviews of him. This was our hour and forty-five minutes and then another hour and fifteen kind of thing were (sic) we sat in there and had these discussions with him." (Testimony of Lt. Gen. Randall M Schmidt, Taken 24 August 2005 at Davis Mountain Air Force Base, Arizona, Dept. of the Army Inspector General, Investigations Division, pp. a-30 to a-53, Jaffer and Singh, op. cit). <snip>
This is a very long blog post, but worth the time to read it. Link:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/what-is-probably-in-the-m_b_76708.html
edited to remove damn brackets I didn't see.
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