Mohamedou Ould Slahi’s Gitmo Memoir: A Slow Death

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Slate has a remarkable three part excerpt from the memoir of Mouhamedou Ould Slahi, a Mauritanian Gitmo detainee subjected to some of the worst torture. The intro, by Larry Siems, is here. (Some posts on his still-ongoing habeas fight are here, here, and here.) The whole thing reflects a remarkable, chilling, understanding of the Americans who kept him captive, even as he succumbs to his torture and starts lying to make the torture stop.

Reading the memoir, even as over a hundred detainees continue their hunger strike, I’m struck by the repeated theme of slow death, both in what Americans say to him, and in how he processes his own torture.

In Slahi’s story of Bagram, he tells of a “cowboy,” believing he doesn’t speak English, wishing he’ll die slowly.

Now I am sitting in front of a bunch of dead-regular U.S. citizens; my first impression, when I saw them chewing without a break: “What’s wrong with these guys, do they have to eat so much?” Most of the guards are tall, and overweight. Some of them were friendly and some very hostile. Whenever I realized that a guard [was hostile], I pretended that I understood no English. I remember one cowboy coming to me with an ugly frown on his face.

“You speak English?” he asked.

“No English,” I replied.

“We don’t like you to speak English, we want you to die slowly,” he said.

“No English,” I kept replying. I didn’t want to give him the satisfaction that his message arrived. People with hatred have always something to get off their chests, but I wasn’t ready to be that drain.

Slahi thinks about slow death as he recounts the fake rendition staged with Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization, in which a Jordanian and Egyptian took Slahi on a boat trip to make him think he might be rendered to Egypt. After hours a beating, they wrapped him in ice.

The order went as follows: They stuffed the air between my clothes and me with ice cubes from my neck to my ankles, and whenever the ice melted they put in new hard ice cubes. Read more →

Outsourcing America’s Bad Human Rights Reputation

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Given all the attention to the Administration’s decision, thus far, to neither Mirandize nor charge Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, I wanted to point back to two things that happened last week.

First, in a hearing before the House Appropriations Committee, in response to Congressman Frank Wolf’s frustrated declaration (for a variety of totally justified — such as Holder’s delay in implementing a prison rape preventing program — and totally bogus reasons) that he was just going to ignore Eric Holder, Holder made a case that his DOJ is doing a great job. Josh Gerstein describes his little speech:

I’m proud of what we’ve done across the board at the Justice Department in the last four and a half years. I’m proud of what I’ve done as attorney general. The department that we have now is fundamentally different than the department I found when I got there. We don’t hire people on the bsis of political orientation. We don’t do things as was done in the previous administration. We don’t write memos that say that torture is appropriate when dealing with interrogation techniques. [my emphasis]

No. As far as we know, at least (given the secrecy of the Administration), they have not written memos saying torture is appropriate when dealing with interrogation. They have, however, written memos stretching the concept of public exception beyond its intended function. They have also written memos reinterpreting due process before execution to mean “what John Brennan says in secret.”

In other words, Eric Holder’s DOJ has written memos authorizing practices that are alternatives, but arguably not much better, than the policies his predecessors rubber stamped.

Meanwhile Micah Zenko has a great post summarizing how many of the counterterrorism acts presumably conducted in cooperation with US forces — if not by US forces yet blamed on local ones — fall under the State Department’s definition of human rights violations.

Today—eighty-nine days past its legal deadline—the State Department released its annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices for 2011. The new, user-friendly interface allows you to find and read individual country chapters much more quickly and easily (and might explain the delay). For all its flaws, the report remains a must-read for its reporting and candor. It serves as a generally honest counter to the rosier assessments of U.S. partners and allies’ human rights practices.

From my vantage point of trying to understand the Obama administration’s policies and practices of target killings, the report is also notable for what it does not include; namely, any mention of U.S. involvement in or responsibility for such operations.

The chapter on Yemen, for instance, has an entire section dedicated to “killings:”

The government also employed air strikes against AQAP and affiliated insurgents in Abyan, with some strikes hitting civilian areas. Although some accused the government of intentionally striking civilians in Abyan, most if not all noncombatant casualties from these bombardments were attributed to a lack of air force training and technical capability.

First, because U.S. targeted killings in Yemen are “covert,” the State Department cannot acknowledge American complicity or collusion. But it stands to reason that some, if not a majority, of these air strikes were carried out by CIA or Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) drones, or even U.S. Navy assets offshore.

Zenko goes on to point to passages criticizing human rights abuses in Turkey, Somalia, and Pakistan that likely have US involvement.

It’s bad enough that the Attorney General’s measurement of his Department’s performence is measured against John Yoo’s standards, not the law, but we’re probably helping other countries violate State’s own standards for human rights.

All the while dodging the real shame that ought to come from such abuses.

 

Even Bipartisan Conventional Wisdom Report Says It Was Torture

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The Constitution Project has released a major report on the government’s torture program. You can download the report here.

The report is important and comprehensive, but not without flaws. It took me a matter of minutes to find a number of errors, repetition of dangerous misinformation, and incomplete reporting. While I may lay out some of these problems at more length after the report has had its big publicity splash, suffice it to say the report tends to preference newspaper reporting over actual primary sources, and at times it appears completely unaware of what primary sources say.*

As such, the report represents a cautious, bipartisan, institutionalist view. Which is why its conclusion is so valuable. Because even this cautious, bipartisan, institutionalist report concludes the following (among other findings):

Finding #1 U.S. forces, in many instances, used interrogation techniques on detainees that constitute torture. American personnel conducted an even larger number of interrogations that involved “cruel, inhuman, or degrading” treatment. Both categories of actions violate U.S. laws and international treaties. Such conduct was directly counter to values of the Constitution and our nation.

Finding #2

The nation’s most senior officials, through some of their actions and failures to act in the months and years immediately following the September 11 attacks, bear ultimate responsibility for allowing and contributing to the spread of illegal and improper interrogation techniques used by some U.S. personnel on detainees in several theaters. Responsibility also falls on other government officials and certain military leaders.

Finding #3

There is no firm or persuasive evidence that the widespread use of harsh interrogation techniques by U.S. forces produced significant information of value. There is substantial evidence that much of the information adduced from the use of such techniques was not useful or reliable.

Finding #16

For detainee hunger strikers, DOD operating procedures called for practices and actions by medical professionals that were contrary to established medical and professional ethical standards, including improper coercive involuntary feedings early in the course of hunger strikes that, when resisted, were accomplished by physically forced nasogastric tube feedings of detainees who were completely restrained.

Finding #19

The high level of secrecy surrounding the rendition and torture of detainees since September 11 cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security.

Finding #21

The Convention Against Torture requires each state party to “[c]riminalize all acts of torture, attempts to commit torture, or complicity or participation in torture,” and “proceed to a prompt and impartial investigation, wherever there is reasonable ground to believe that an act of torture has been committed in any territory under its jurisdiction.” The United States cannot be said to have complied with this requirement.

In short: it was torture, it was illegal, it was not valuable, and it still needs to be prosecuted. (And, among other findings implicating it directly, the Obama Administration needs to stop force feeding Gitmo detainees.)

And all that’s ignoring some of the more damning evidence out there.

Let’s see whether bipartisan conventional wisdom serves its purported purpose, effecting change in cautious, institutionalist DC.

*I am admittedly biased on this front. I was within a day of being contracted to collect documents for this effort, but someone involved in the process deemed me — at a time when I was already loudly criticizing the Obama Administration for things they’ve done — too partisan for the project. Some of the documents I had already identified at that time are utterly absent from this report; in their place the report claims ignorance.

New York Times Runs Powerful Op-Ed By Gitmo Prisoner

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"force-feeding at guantanamo" by Natasha Mayers (under Creative Commons license via flickr)

“force-feeding at guantanamo” by Natasha Mayers (under Creative Commons license via flickr)

With the simple title “Gitmo Is Killing Me”, today’s New York Times carries a chilling first-hand account from a hunger-striking prisoner at Guantanamo. Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel is one of 25 Yemeni prisoners held at Guantanamo who have been cleared for release but are still held because the US feels Yemen is too unstable for the prisoners to return there.

A theme that I keep returning to regarding the hunger strike at Guantanamo is that the military is conducting an information operation to limit damage to its reputation through reducing attention to the harsh treatment guards mete out to the prisoners. That is why, as I pointed out yesterday, Saturday’s operation to shut down the communal areas at the prison and return the prisoners to individual cells was carried out after the ICRC left and at a time when no members of the press were present. With that in mind, the military is very likely to view the publication of this piece as a huge loss of control of the narrative. While they had portrayed the Saturday action as taking place against resistance by the prisoners using “improvised weapons” (a description that was avidly eaten up by the press), Naji’s account of the pain and humiliation of forced feedings changes the focus from violence by the prisoners to violence being visited upon them.

The Times explains that Naji “told this story, through an Arabic interpreter, to his lawyers at the legal charity Reprieve in an unclassified telephone call”. Given previous behavior by the military at Guantanamo, I hope that they do not used their embarrassment over publication of this piece to limit phone calls from prisoners to their attorneys.

Naji explains his situation:

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

Naji is 35 years old, so he has been a prisoner at Guantanamo for nearly a third of his life. He has never been charged. He has never been tried. Is it any wonder that he would give up hope and choose to starve himself to death?

Naji’s account of the forced feedings is horrifying:

There are so many of us on hunger strike now that there aren’t enough qualified medical staff members to carry out the force-feedings; nothing is happening at regular intervals. They are feeding people around the clock just to keep up.

During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into my stomach, hurting me more than usual, because she was doing things so hastily. I called the interpreter to ask the doctor if the procedure was being done correctly or not.

It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to stop feeding me. As they were finishing, some of the “food” spilled on my clothes. I asked them to change my clothes, but the guard refused to allow me to hold on to this last shred of my dignity.

Most human rights groups object to the practice of forced feedings of hunger striking prisoners. Carol Rosenberg quotes Physicians for Human Rights: Read more →

Andy Card LOL: Bush Can’t Pardon Himself for Torture (But Obama Has)

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As part of the discussion in his book explaining how the CIA shifted from torture to killing, Mark Mazzetti tells the story of how the CIA balked at engaging in further torture after the Detainee Treatment Act.

After President Bush signed the bill into law, then-CIA Director Porter Goss wrote the White House saying the CIA would refuse to torture unless and until they got a guarantee they wouldn’t be prosecuted for doing it. In response, the Bush Administration sent Andy Card to the CIA to try to calm them down.

Card drove out to Langley intending to soothe the fears at CIA headquarters, but his visit was a disaster. Inside a packed conference room, Card thanked the assembled CIA officers for their service and their hard work but refused to make any firm declarations that agency officers wouldn’t be criminally liable for participating in the detention-and-interrogation program.

The room became restless. Prodded by his chief of staff, Patrick Murray, Porter Goss interrupted Card.

“Can you assure these people that the politicians will not walk away from the people who carried out this program?” Goss asked. Card didn’t answer the question directly. Instead, he tried to crack a joke.

“Let me put it this way,” he said. “Every morning I knock on the door of the Oval Office, walk in, and say, ‘Pardon me, Mr. President.’ And of course, the only person the president can’t pardon is himself.”

Card giggled after he said this, but his joke landed with a thud. The White House chief of staff, when asked whether President Bush would protect CIA officers from legal scrutiny, had suggested that the most they might be abel to rely on is a presidential pardon after the indictments and convictions were handed down. (127-128)

Goss effectively repeated a request the CIA had made, unsuccessfully, as early as July 13, 2002 (when, it should be said, Goss was ostensibly in charge of overseeing the program at the House Intelligence Committee, though there’s no reason to believe he knew about the earlier request): for an Administration guarantee that everyone involved in the torture program would be shielded from criminal consequences for kidnapping and torturing.

And in response, Card implied to these CIA officers and executives two things:

  • President Bush would pardon anyone convicted of crimes related to torture
  • Bush, himself, was ultimately exposed to prosecution for those crimes as well (all the more so, since he couldn’t pardon his own crimes)

Now, Card wouldn’t have even tried such a joke unless he knew his audience knew that the torture program was based on a Presidential Finding — what we know to be the September 17, 2001 Gloves Come Off Memorandum of Notification.

There’s fairly clear evidence that CIA’s officers did know about it.

George Tenet had made that clear on every single page of his January 2003 Guidelines on Interrogations, which at least some CIA interrogators had to sign.  Read more →

John Bogdan: The Face of the Guantanamo Crackdown

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John Bogdan as his 95th Military Police Battalion assumed command of Forward Operating Base Rustimayah in Baghdad in November, 2001.

John Bogdan as his 95th Military Police Battalion assumed command of Forward Operating Base Rustimayah in Baghdad in November, 2007.

In yesterday’s pre-dawn hours, the guard force at Guantanamo entered the Camp 6 communal area and removed the prisoners to individual cells. Here is Carol Rosenberg’s description of the operation (emphasis added):

U.S. forces raided Guantánamo’s showcase prison camp early Saturday, at times battling with detainees, to systematically empty communal cellblocks in an effort to end a three-month-old protest that prisoners said was sparked by mistreatment of the Quran, the military said.

“Some detainees resisted with improvised weapons and, in response, four less-than-lethal rounds were fired,” according to a statement issued by the prison camps at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba. “There were no serious injuries to guards or detainees.”

The pre-dawn operation took place hours after delegates of the International Committee of the Red Cross left the remote island prison and during a blackout of news media access to the crisis in the prison camps.

The worst injury involved a rubber pellet piercing a captive’s “flank,” said Army Col. Gregory Julian at the U.S. Southern Command, which has oversight of the prison camps operation. The captives resisted the assault with broom and mop handles as well as plastic water bottles that had been wrapped and modified into clubs, he said.

Note how the military waited until after the ICRC had left Guantanamo (and after the ICRC’s president met with Barack Obama) to make this move while there were also no press present at the compound. I have noted previously how the military’s actions and statements during the hunger strike appear to have been an information operation and this move fits that description exactly.

When the military cancelled commercial flights to Guantanamo, I speculated on whether the new commander of Joint Task Force Guantanamo, John Smith, who took over in June of 2012, was responsible for the change in atmosphere there. It appears that the defense attorneys feel that more of the blame for deteriorating conditions should lie with John Bogdan, who is Commander of the Joint Detention Group (alternately described as the warden, he is in charge of the guards). See, for example, this parenthetical statement in an Andy Worthington post describing information he got from Shaker Aamer’s attorney: Read more →

America’s Human Rights Abusers: John Yoo, David Addington, and Bout’s Prosecution Team

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In retaliation for the Magnitsky sanctions — in which the US placed sanctions on those deemed to have had a role in retaliating against Sergei Magnitsky’s whistleblowing — Russia just issued a list of 18 Americans who will be prohibited from traveling to Russia.

The list released by the Foreign Ministry includes John Yoo, a former U.S. Justice Department official who wrote legal memos authorizing harsh interrogation techniques; David Addington, the chief of staff for former U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney; and two former commanders of the Guantánamo Bay detention center: retired Army Maj. Gen. Geoffrey Miller and Navy Rear Adm. Jeffrey Harbeson.

[snip]

Also on Russia’s list are 14 Americans whom Russia says violated the rights of Russians abroad. It does not give specifics of the alleged violations, but includes several current or former federal prosecutors in the case of Viktor Bout, the Russian arms merchant sentenced in 2012 to 25 years in prison for selling weapons to a U.S.-designated foreign terrorist group. One FBI agent and four U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration agents also are on the list.

In addition, there’s a closed list of Americans who are, according to Russia’s Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov, personally responsible for legalizing torture and indefinite detention. So maybe Dick Cheney is on that list.

I’m actually more interested Russia sanctioned Bout’s prosecutors than Yoo (it doesn’t take much creativity, after all, to call Yoo a human rights violator). After all, Bout only ever did the same kinds of things Erik Prince does for us, and our claim that we had jurisdiction over his sales stretched traditional jurisdiction beyond belief.

In any case, it sure seemed pretty easy for Russia to accuse us of violating human rights just like it does.

I Hate to Say I Told You So, John Brennan Covering Up Torture Report Edition

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Man, have the Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee — particularly Dianne Feinstein and Jay Rockefeller — been pawned. One of their key issues during John Brennan’s confirmation was the declassification of the 6,000 page torture report.

Based on both Saxby Chambliss’ representation of comments Brennan made in their private meeting and on the delayed CIA response about the report, I predicted Brennan would be stating publicly what he stated privately (not having read most of the report yet) to Saxby.

During John Brennan’s confirmation process, he answered questions about the Senate Intelligence Committee report on torture with two faces. To Saxby Chambliss in private, he said he thought the report was a prosecutorial document, set up to come to pre-ordained conclusions. Publicly, to Democrats, he said he was shocked–shocked!–by what he had read in the Executive Summary of the report.

It was quite clear that Brennan was playing the lawmakers who would get to vote on his confirmation, but they didn’t delay his confirmation to resolve the report declassification.

When Brennan’s confirmation got delayed by demands to exercise oversight, the CIA delayed its response — originally due February 15 — on the contents of the report. Indefinitely.

All of this, of course, sets up Brennan to refuse to declassify the report because he believes (and, importantly, believed from the start, according to Saxby Chambliss) that the people who have now rushed his confirmation through were acting in an unfairly prosecutorial mode when they spent 5 years documenting what CIA did in its torture program.

Here’s what Brennan said to Jan Schakowsky yesterday when she asked about the report.

SCHAKOWSKY: Let me ask you also, Mr. Brennan, as you know, the Senate Intelligence Committee report on former CIA detention and interrogation practices is under review with the — within the administration and the agency. Comments were originally due back to the committee on February 15, though the reply has now been delayed indefinitely.

On March 7 in the New York Times, former CIA Senior Analyst, Emile Nakhleh said that if any person can take this on, it would be you, Director Brennan. It’s you and that, quote, “the institution would benefit from the eventual — eventual declassification and release of the study.”

What is the current status of the review of the report and can you please just, if you could, discuss the importance as a leader of the — the leader of the CIA of its release?

BRENNAN: Well, clearly, it’s — it’s an important report that was issued by the — the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. I have as — as recently as earlier this [week] spoken with both the chairman and the vice chairman of the — the committee telling them that I am in the process of the reviewing of the — the document and will be getting back to them shortly. This is a 6,000 page document that has, you know, millions of pages behind it in terms of what was reviewed.

And so it’s my obligation as the Director of CIA to make sure that my response back to them is going to be thorough and as accurate as possible and will convey my views about what that report portrays about CIA’s past practices, what we have learned from that experience running the program as well as from that report and also to identify things that I might think that the — the committee may have — the committee’s report might not accurately represent. [my emphasis]

Schakowsky asked about the import of releasing the report, and Brennan instead responded by talking about using the report as a lessons learned document and also objecting to some of the things found in it.

But it sure looks like, unless someone starts pulling teeth, CIA will be “learning from this experience as well as from the report” in private, because Brennan pointedly didn’t respond to Schakowsky’s question about releasing the document publicly.

John Brennan Says All the Bad Reports about CIA Are Inaccurate

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Kudos to Jan Schakowsky, who used today’s hearing on global threats to ask John Brennan some of the questions he so rarely gets asked.

She started by asking him generally about drones and his previous public comments about them. He responded by noting that he was a White House figure then, now he’s CIA Director (implying, I guess, that he shouldn’t be held to his previous comments).

She then asked specifically about Jonathan Landay’s reporting on the drone strikes — which, as you’ll recall, is reported directly from intelligence reports on drone strikes. Brennan responded, “A lot of things in press are reported inaccurately, in my opinion.” (Mind you, Landay’s reports did give Brennan an excuse for having lied so blatantly about civilian casualties in the past, so I guess his reporting is inaccurate, even though it helps Brennan!)

Schakowsky then asked about the difference between targeted and signature strikes. Brennan pointed back to the earlier dog and pony show on drones, which pretended signature strikes didn’t exist.

Schakowsky then asked for an update on the torture report. Brennan revealed he had spoken with Dianne Feinstein and Saxby Chambliss earlier this week. He told them he was in the process of reviewing the report (keep in mind, the original response to SSCI was due February 15, almost two months ago) and was doing a “thorough” review of some things he believed the committee did not report accurately.

If you’re John Brennan, if internal reports on drones make the CIA look bad, and if internal reports on torture make the CIA look bad, they are by definition inaccurate.