Senate releases CIA torture report

[Magda Hassan]

[video=youtube]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Krdxr1EwQ_s&feature=youtu.be&list=UU1Q5AcK 9yrzrrGmAh7wgCig[/video]
"deputy chief of ALEC Station" in the Senate Torture Report is ALFREDA FRANCES BIKOWSKY. She blocked the FBI cable from Alec Station warning of Al-Mihdar's VISA to travel to America in January 2000. She is a criminal and she should be in jail: http://www.nbcnews.com/news/investiga...

The Unidentified Queen of Torture

By Jane Mayer


For the past eight months, there has been a furious battle raging behind closed doors at the White House, the C.I.A., and in Congress. The question has been whether the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence would be allowed to use pseudonyms as a means of identifying characters in the devastating report it released last week on the C.I.A.'s abusive interrogation and detention program. Ultimately, the committee was not allowed to, and now we know one reason why.
The NBC News investigative reporter Matthew Cole has pieced together a remarkable story revealing that a single senior officer, who is still in a position of high authority over counterterrorism at the C.I.A.a woman who he does not nameappears to have been a source of years' worth of terrible judgment, with tragic consequences for the United States. Her story runs through the entire report. She dropped the ball when the C.I.A. was given information that might very well have prevented the 9/11 attacks; she gleefully participated in torture sessions afterward; she misinterpreted intelligence in such a way that it sent the C.I.A. on an absurd chase for Al Qaeda sleeper cells in Montana. And then she falsely told congressional overseers that the torture worked.
Had the Senate Intelligence Committee been permitted to use pseudonyms for the central characters in its report, as all previous congressional studies of intelligence failures, including the widely heralded Church Committee report in 1975, have done, it might not have taken a painstaking, and still somewhat cryptic, investigation after the fact in order for the American public to hold this senior official accountable. Many people who have worked with her over the years expressed shock to NBC that she has been entrusted with so much power. A former intelligence officer who worked directly with her is quoted by NBC, on background, as saying that she bears so much responsibility for so many intelligence failures that "she should be put on trial and put in jail for what she has done."
Instead, however, she has been promoted to the rank of a general in the military, most recently working as the head of the C.I.A.'s global-jihad unit. In that perch, she oversees the targeting of terror suspects around the world. (She was also, in part, the model for the lead character in "Zero Dark Thirty.")
According to sources in the law-enforcement community who I have interviewed over the years, and who I spoke to again this week, this womanwhose name the C.I.A. has asked the news media to withholdhad supervision over an underling at the agency who failed to share with the F.B.I. the news that two of the future 9/11 hijackers had entered the United States prior to the terrorist attacks. As I recount in my book "The Dark Side," the C.I.A. got wind that one of these Al Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar, had obtained a multiple-entry visa into the United States eighteen months before 9/11. The agency also learned, months before the attacks, that another Al Qaeda operative, Nawaf al-Hazmi, had flown into Los Angeles. Yet the C.I.A. appears to have done nothing. It never alerted the F.B.I., which had the principle domestic authority for protecting the U.S. from terror attacks. Its agents had, in fact, been on the trail of at least one of the hijackers previously, but had no way of knowing that he had entered the United States. Nor did the C.I.A. alert the State Department, which kept a "TIPOFF" watch list for terror suspects.
Amazingly, perhaps, more than thirteen years after the 9/11 attacks, no one at the C.I.A. has ever been publicly held responsible for this failure. Evidently, the C.I.A. was adamant in its negotiations with the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee that the American public never learn the names of anyone directly involved in this failure.
As NBC recounts, this egregious chapter was apparently only the first in a long tale, in which the same C.I.A. official became a driving force in the use of waterboarding and other sadistic interrogation techniques that were later described by President Obama as "torture." She personally partook in the waterboarding of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the architect of the 9/11 attacks, at a black site in Poland. According to the Senate report, she sent a bubbly cable back to C.I.A. headquarters in 2003, anticipating the pain they planned to inflict on K.S.M. in an attempt to get him to confirm a report from another detainee, about a plot to use African-American Muslims training in Afghanistan for future terrorist attacks. "i love the Black American Muslim at AQ camps in Afghanuistan (sic). … Mukie (K.S.M.) is going to be hatin' life on this one," she wrote, according to the report. But, as NBC notes, she misconstrued the intelligence gathered from the other detainee. Somehow, the C.I.A. mistakenly believed that African-American Muslim terrorists were already in the United States. The intelligence officials evidently pressed K.S.M. so hard to confirm this, under such physical duress, that he eventually did, even though it was falseleading U.S. officials on a wild-goose chase for black Muslim Al Qaeda operatives in Montana. According to the report, the same woman oversaw the extraction of this false lead, as well as the months-long rendition and gruesome interrogation of another detainee whose detention was a case of mistaken identity. Later, in 2007, she accompanied then C.I.A. director Michael Hayden to brief Congress, where she insisted forcefully that the torture program had been a tremendous and indispensable success.
Readers can speculate on how the pieces fit together, and who the personalities behind this program are. But without even pseudonyms, it is exceedingly hard to connect the dots. It seems entirely possiblethough, again, one can only speculatethat the C.I.A. overcompensated for its pre-9/11 intelligence failures by employing overly harsh measures later. Once they'd made a choice that America had never officially made beforeof sanctioning tortureit seems possible that they felt they had to defend its efficacy, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. If so, this would be worth learning. But without names, or even pseudonyms, it is almost impossible to piece together the puzzle, or hold anyone in the American government accountable. Evidently, that is exactly what the C.I.A. was fighting for during its eight-month-long redaction process, behind all those closed doors.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/...en-torture

[Magda Hassan]

Old habits die hard it seems. Any other body that continuously breached its remit would be disbanded. Careers ended. Professional disbarment. Jail time.

Time for the APA to get some seriously hard questions about their reason to even exist and the conduct of their members seemingly under their auspices.

The CIA Didn't Just Torture, It Experimented on Human Beings

Reframing the CIA's interrogation techniques as a violation of scientific and medical ethics may be the best way to achieve accountability.


Lisa Hajjar
December 16, 2014 | This article appeared in the January 5, 2015 edition of The Nation.

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(AP Photo/Maya Alleruzzo, File)



Human experimentation was a core feature of the CIA's torture program. The experimental nature of the interrogation and detention techniques is clearly evident in the Senate Intelligence Committee's executive summary of its investigative report, despite redactions (insisted upon by the CIA) to obfuscate the locations of these laboratories of cruel science and the identities of perpetrators.

At the helm of this human experimentation project were two psychologists hired by the CIA, James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen. They designed interrogation and detention protocols that they and others applied to people imprisoned in the agency's secret "black sites."
In its response to the Senate report, the CIA justified its decision to hire the duo: "We believe their expertise was so unique that we would have been derelict had we not sought them out when it became clear that CIA would be heading into the uncharted territory of the program." Mitchell and Jessen's qualifications did not include interrogation experience, specialized knowledge about Al Qaeda or relevant cultural or linguistic knowledge. What they had was Air Force experience in studying the effects of torture on American prisoners of war, as well as a curiosity about whether theories of "learned helplessness" derived from experiments on dogs might work on human enemies.

To implement those theories, Mitchell and Jessen oversaw or personally engaged in techniques intended to produce "debility, disorientation and dread." Their "theory" had a particular means-ends relationship that is not well understood, as Mitchell testily explained in an interview on Vice News: "The point of the bad cop is to get the bad guy to talk to the good cop." In other words, "enhanced interrogation techniques" (the Bush administration's euphemism for torture) do not themselves produce useful information; rather, they produce the condition of total submission that will facilitate extraction of actionable intelligence.
Mitchell, like former CIA Director Michael Hayden and others who have defended the torture program, argues that a fundamental error in the Senate report is the elision of means (waterboarding, "rectal rehydration," weeks or months of nakedness in total darkness and isolation, and other techniques intended to break prisoners) and endsmanufactured compliance, which, the defenders claim, enabled the collection of abundant intelligence that kept Americans safe. (That claim is amply and authoritatively contradicted in the report.)
As Americans from the Beltway to the heartland debateagainthe legality and efficacy of "enhanced interrogation," we are reminded that "torture" has lost its stigma as morally reprehensible and criminal behavior. That was evident in the 2012 GOP presidential primary, when more than half of the candidates vowed to bring back waterboarding, and it is on full display now. On Meet the Press, for example, former Vice President Dick Cheney, who functionally topped the national security decision-making hierarchy during the Bush years, announced that he "would do it again in a minute."
No one has been held accountable for torture, beyond a handful of prosecutions of low-level troops and contractors. Indeed, impunity has been virtually guaranteed as a result of various Faustian bargains, which include "golden shield" legal memos written by government lawyers for the CIA; ex post facto immunity for war crimes that Congress inserted in the 2006 Military Commissions Act; classification and secrecy that still shrouds the torture program, as is apparent in the Senate report's redactions; and the "look forward, not backward" position that President Obama has maintained through every wave of public revelations since 2009. An American majority, it seems, has come to accept the legacy of torture.
Human experimentation, in contrast, has not been politically refashioned into a legitimate or justifiable enterprise. Therefore, it would behoove us to appreciate the fact that the architects and implementers of black-site torments were authorized at the highest levels of the White House and CIA to experiment on human beings. Reading the report through this lens casts a different light on questions of accountability and impunity.
The "war on terror" is not the CIA's first venture into human experimentation. At the dawn of the Cold War, German scientists and doctors with Nazi records of human experimentation were given new identities and brought to the United States under Operation Paperclip. During the Korean War, alarmed by the shocking rapidity of American POWs' breakdowns and indoctrination by their communist captors, the CIA began investing in mind-control research. In 1953, the CIA established the MK-ULTRA program, whose earliest phase involved hypnosis, electroshock and hallucinogenic drugs. The program evolved into experiments in psychological torture that adapted elements of Soviet and Chinese models, including longtime standing, protracted isolation, sleep deprivation and humiliation. Those lessons soon became an applied "science" in the Cold War.
During the Vietnam War, the CIA developed the Phoenix program, which combined psychological torture with brutal interrogations, human experimentation and extrajudicial executions. In 1963, the CIA produced a manual titled "Kubark Counterintelligence Interrogation" to guide agents in the art of extracting information from "resistant" sources by combining techniques to produce "debility, disorientation and dread." Like the communists, the CIA largely eschewed tactics that violently target the body in favor of those that target the mind by systematically attacking all human senses in order to produce the desired state of compliance. The Phoenix program model was incorporated into the curriculum of the School of the Americas, and an updated version of the Kubark guide, produced in 1983 and titled "Human Resource Exploitation Manual," was disseminated to the intelligence services of right-wing regimes in Latin America and Southeast Asia during the global "war on communism."
In the mid-1980s, CIA practices became the subject of congressional investigations into US-supported atrocities in Central America. Both manuals became public in 1997 as a result of Freedom of Information Act litigation by The Baltimore Sun. That would have seemed like a "never again" moment.
But here we are again. This brings us back to Mitchell and Jessen. Because of their experience as trainers in the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program, after 9/11 they were contacted by high-ranking Pentagon officials and, later, by lawyers who wanted to know whether some of those SERE techniques could be reverse-engineered to get terrorism suspects to talk.
The road from abstract hypotheticals (can SERE be reverse-engineered?) to the authorized use of waterboarding and confinement boxes runs straight into the terrain of human experimentation. On April 15, 2002, Mitchell and Jessen arrived at a black site in Thailand to supervise the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, the first "high-value detainee" captured by the CIA. By July, Mitchell proposed more coercive techniques to CIA headquarters, and many of these were approved in late July. From then until the program was dry-docked in 2008, at least thirty-eight people were subjected to psychological and physical torments, and the results were methodically documented and analyzed. That is the textbook definition of human experimentation.
My point is not to minimize the illegality of torture or the legal imperatives to pursue accountability for perpetrators. Rather, because the concept of torture has been so muddled and disputed, I suggest that accountability would be more publicly palatable if we reframed the CIA's program as one of human experimentation. If we did so, it would be more difficult to laud or excuse perpetrators as "patriots" who "acted in good faith." Although torture has become a Rorschach test among political elites playing to public opinion on the Sunday morning talk shows, human experimentation has no such community of advocates and apologists.
http://www.thenation.com/article/193185/...man-beings

[Paul Rigby]

Right when the CIA started torturing people, Congress passed a law that said we would Invade the Netherlands if any US Citizen was tried in the International Criminal Court

Thursday, December 18, 2014

http://pocketsandshasha.blogspot.co.uk/2...eople.html

ASPA authorizes the U.S. president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization has led the act to be nicknamed The Hague Invasion Act,[3][4] because the freeing of U.S. citizens by force might be possible only through an invasion of The Hague, Netherlands, the seat of several international criminal courts and of the Dutch government.

The act prohibits federal, state and local governments and agencies (including courts and law enforcement agencies) from assisting the court. For example, it prohibits the extradition of any person from the U.S. to the Court; it prohibits the transfer of classified national security information and law enforcement information to the court; and it prohibits agents of the court from conducting investigations in the U.S.

The act also prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the court. However, exceptions are allowed for aid to NATO members, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, and countries that have entered into "Article 98 agreements", agreeing not to hand over U.S. nationals to the court. The president may waive this prohibition if he determines that to do so is "important to the national interest of the US".
Read the Wikipedia entry on: American Service-Members' Protection Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Se...ection_Act

[Albert Doyle]

Any chance that the Sony movie and its death threat against Kim Jong un was pre-planned and timed to offset the release of the Senate Torture report? Did US get Sony to make this movie in order to precipitate the reaction? And was the Cuba detente also similarly timed?

[David Guyatt]

Right when the CIA started torturing people, Congress passed a law that said we would Invade the Netherlands if any US Citizen was tried in the International Criminal Court

Thursday, December 18, 2014

http://pocketsandshasha.blogspot.co.uk/2...eople.html

ASPA authorizes the U.S. president to use "all means necessary and appropriate to bring about the release of any US or allied personnel being detained or imprisoned by, on behalf of, or at the request of the International Criminal Court". This authorization has led the act to be nicknamed The Hague Invasion Act,[3][4] because the freeing of U.S. citizens by force might be possible only through an invasion of The Hague, Netherlands, the seat of several international criminal courts and of the Dutch government.

The act prohibits federal, state and local governments and agencies (including courts and law enforcement agencies) from assisting the court. For example, it prohibits the extradition of any person from the U.S. to the Court; it prohibits the transfer of classified national security information and law enforcement information to the court; and it prohibits agents of the court from conducting investigations in the U.S.

The act also prohibits U.S. military aid to countries that are party to the court. However, exceptions are allowed for aid to NATO members, major non-NATO allies, Taiwan, and countries that have entered into "Article 98 agreements", agreeing not to hand over U.S. nationals to the court. The president may waive this prohibition if he determines that to do so is "important to the national interest of the US".
Read the Wikipedia entry on: American Service-Members' Protection Act

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Se...ection_Act

[Magda Hassan]

How's it feel to be a client state Holland?

[Peter Lemkin]

The Anti-Empire Report #135

By William Blum Published December 19th, 2014

American Exceptionalism and American Torture
In 1964, the Brazilian military, in a US-designed coup, overthrew a liberal (not more to the left than that) government and proceeded to rule with an iron fist for the next 21 years. In 1979 the military regime passed an amnesty law blocking the prosecution of its members for torture and other crimes. The amnesty still holds.
That's how they handle such matters in what used to be called The Third World. In the First World, however, they have no need for such legal niceties. In the United States, military torturers and their political godfathers are granted amnesty automatically, simply for being American, solely for belonging to the "Good Guys Club".
So now, with the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture, we have further depressing revelations about US foreign policy. But do Americans and the world need yet another reminder that the United States is a leading practitioner of torture? Yes. The message can not be broadcast too often because the indoctrination of the American people and Americophiles all around the world is so deeply embedded that it takes repeated shocks to the system to dislodge it. No one does brainwashing like the good ol' Yankee inventors of advertising and public relations. And there is always a new generation just coming of age with stars (and stripes) in their eyes.
The public also has to be reminded yet again that contrary to what most of the media and Mr. Obama would have us all believe the president has never actually banned torture per se, despite saying recently that he had "unequivocally banned torture" after taking office.
Shortly after Obama's first inauguration, both he and Leon Panetta, the new Director of the CIA, explicitly stated that "rendition" was not being ended. As the Los Angeles Times reported at the time: "Under executive orders issued by Obama recently, the CIA still has authority to carry out what are known as renditions, secret abductions and transfers of prisoners to countries that cooperate with the United States."
The English translation of "cooperate" is "torture". Rendition is simply outsourcing torture. There was no other reason to take prisoners to Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Egypt, Jordan, Kenya, Somalia, Kosovo, or the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, amongst other torture centers employed by the United States. Kosovo and Diego Garcia both of which house large and very secretive American military bases if not some of the other locations, may well still be open for torture business, as is the Guantánamo Base in Cuba.
Moreover, the key Executive Order referred to, number 13491, issued January 22, 2009, "Ensuring Lawful Interrogations", leaves a major loophole. It states repeatedly that humane treatment, including the absence of torture, is applicable only to prisoners detained in an "armed conflict". Thus, torture by Americans outside an environment of "armed conflict" is not explicitly prohibited. But what about torture within an environment of "counter-terrorism"?
The Executive Order required the CIA to use only the interrogation methods outlined in a revised Army Field Manual. However, using the Army Field Manual as a guide to prisoner treatment and interrogation still allows solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory deprivation, sensory overload, sleep deprivation, the induction of fear and hopelessness, mind-altering drugs, environmental manipulation such as temperature and noise, and stress positions, amongst other charming examples of American Exceptionalism.
After Panetta was questioned by a Senate panel, the New York Times wrote that he had "left open the possibility that the agency could seek permission to use interrogation methods more aggressive than the limited menu that President Obama authorized under new rules … Mr. Panetta also said the agency would continue the Bush administration practice of rendition' … But he said the agency would refuse to deliver a suspect into the hands of a country known for torture or other actions that violate our human values'."
The last sentence is of course childishly absurd. The countries chosen to receive rendition prisoners were chosen precisely and solely because they were willing and able to torture them.
Four months after Obama and Panetta took office, the New York Times could report that renditions had reached new heights.
The present news reports indicate that Washington's obsession with torture stems from 9/11, to prevent a repetition. The president speaks of "the fearful excesses of the post-9/11 era". There's something to that idea, but not a great deal. Torture in America is actually as old as the country. What government has been intimately involved with that horror more than the United States? Teaching it, supplying the manuals, supplying the equipment, creation of international torture centers, kidnaping people to these places, solitary confinement, forced feeding, Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Chicago … Lord forgive us!
In 2011, Brazil instituted a National Truth Commission to officially investigate the crimes of the military government, which came to an end in 1985. But Mr. Obama has in fact rejected calls for a truth commission concerning CIA torture. On June 17 of this year, however, when Vice President Joseph Biden was in Brazil, he gave the Truth Commission 43 State Department cables and reports concerning the Brazilian military regime, including one entitled "Widespread Arrests and Psychophysical Interrogation of Suspected Subversives."
Thus it is that once again the United States of America will not be subjected to any accountability for having broken US laws, international laws, and the fundamental laws of human decency. Obama can expect the same kindness from his successor as he has extended to George W.

"One of the strengths that makes America exceptional is our willingness to openly confront our past, face our imperfections, make changes and do better." Barack Obama, written statement issued moments after the Senate report was made public.

And if that pile of hypocrisy is not big enough or smelly enough, try adding to it Bidens' remark re his visit to Brazil: "I hope that in taking steps to come to grips with our past we can find a way to focus on the immense promise of the future."
If the torturers of the Bush and Obama administrations are not held accountable in the United States they must be pursued internationally under the principles of universal jurisdiction.
In 1984, an historic step was taken by the United Nations with the drafting of the "Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment" (came into force in 1987, ratified by the United States in 1994). Article 2, section 2 of the Convention states: "No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture."
Such marvelously clear, unequivocal, and principled language, to set a single standard for a world that makes it increasingly difficult for one to feel proud of humanity. We cannot slide back. If today it's deemed acceptable to torture the person who supposedly has the vital "ticking-bomb" information needed to save lives, tomorrow it will be acceptable to torture him to learn the identities of his alleged co-conspirators. Would we allow slavery to resume for just a short while to serve some "national emergency" or some other "higher purpose"?
If you open the window of torture, even just a crack, the cold air of the Dark Ages will fill the whole room.


Associated Press, December 11, 2014
New York Times, December 11, 2014
Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2009
New York Times, February 6, 2009
New York Times, May 24, 2009
Washington Post, December 11, 2014
National Security Archive's Brazil Documentation Project
Washington Post, December 10, 2014
See note 7

[Albert Doyle]

It's pretty obvious that a CIA military government that has no qualms about torturing is a government that will have no qualms about running a false democracy at home. This is a grotesque international abomination that takes advantage of all the excuses necessary to create an unaccountable monster world government.

[Peter Lemkin]

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: A human rights group in Berlin, Germany, has filed a criminal complaint against the architects of the George W. Bush administration's torture program. The European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights has accused former Bush administration officials, including CIA Director George Tenet and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, of war crimes, and called for an immediate investigation by a German prosecutor. The move follows the release of a Senate report on CIA torture, which includes the case of a German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was captured by CIA agents in 2004 due to mistaken identity and tortured at a secret prison in Afghanistan. So far, no one involved in the CIA torture program has been charged with a crimeexcept the whistleblower John Kiriakou, who exposed it.
AMY GOODMAN: In a statement earlier this week, Wolfgang Kaleck, general secretary of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights, said, "By investigating members of the Bush administration, Germany can help to ensure that those responsible for abduction, abuse and illegal detention do not go unpunished," unquote.
Meanwhile, President Obama is standing by his long-standing refusal to investigate or prosecute Bush administration officials for the torture program. In a statement, he called on the nation not to, quote, "refight old arguments." As Obama continues to reject a criminal probe of Bush-era torture, former Vice President Dick Cheney has said he would do it all again. Cheney spoke to NBC's Meet the Press Sunday.

DICK CHENEY: With respect to trying to define that as torture, I come back to the proposition torture was what the al-Qaeda terrorists did to 3,000 Americans on 9/11. There is no comparison between that and what we did with respect to enhanced interrogation. ... It worked. It worked now. For 13 years we've avoided another mass casualty attack against the United States. We did capture bin Laden. We did capture an awful lot of the senior guys of al-Qaeda who were responsible for that attack on 9/11. I'd do it again in a minute.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Cheney's claim that he would approve torture again highlights a key question: Are top officials above the law, and will the impunity of today lead to more abuses in the future? The question spans a wide chain of command from Cheney, President Bush and other White House officials, who kickstarted the torture program after 9/11; to the lawyers in the Justice Department, who drafted the memos providing legal cover; to the CIA officials, who implemented the abuses and misled Congress and the public; and to the military psychologists, who helped devise the techniques inflicted on prisoners at U.S. military prisons and secret black sites across the globe.
AMY GOODMAN: To talk more about this, we're joined now by two guests. Michael Ratner is back with us, president emeritus of the Center for Constitutional Rights, chair of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights. CCR has been working with the European Center to file criminal complaints against Bush administration officials complicit in the use of torture. He's also the author of The Trial of Donald Rumsfeld: A Prosecution by Book.
Martin Garbus is also back with us, one of the leading attorneys in the U.S. Time magazine calls him "one of the best trial lawyers in the country." National Law Journal has named him one of the country's top 10 litigators.
We welcome you both back to Democracy Now! Yesterday we were talking to you both about Cuba; today we're talking about all the news that has come out. Martin Garbus, should President Bush, should George Tenet, should Donald Rumsfeld, should Dick Cheney be put on trial for torture?
MARTIN GARBUS: They should be. The bad thing about it is they all have a defense they can rely on: They have the defense of the lawyers' opinions that were given to themthe opinions of Gonzales, Bybee and John Yoo. And unless you can pierce those decisions, you have a very tough time. It seems to me a prosecution that ends badlyand I think it would end badly in the United Statesmight not be one that will be brought. But what should happen is with respect to those lawyers. When Jay Bybee was elected to the court of appeals in 2002was nominated and then voted upon by the Senateand John Yoo presently teaches at Berkeley university. At the
AMY GOODMAN: At University of California, Berkeley, law school.
MARTIN GARBUS: California. At the time that Yoo was appointed to Berkeley, there was a mass demonstration of students against him. At the time that Bybee was nominated for the judgeship by Bush, he was criticized, but you did not yet have all this information. What Senator Leahy has said, that if you had all this information, Jay Bybee never would have passed. Clearly, if you had all this information that you have now, John Yoo wouldn't be appointed. What should happen is there should be complaints filed in the bar associations. They should be suspended and disbarred. Then, perhaps, if you have a prosecution, you already have established the faultiness, the horrific faultiness, of the legal opinions. So it seems to me, at least in this country, a condition precedent, as we lawyers say, before you can have a prosecution, has to be the invalidation of the legal opinions.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And
MICHAEL RATNER: I want to just say, I'm not here to debate Marty on this. And he's a defense lawyer. But I strongly disagree that Bush, Cheney, et al., would have a defense. This wasn't like these memos just appeared independently from the Justice Department. These memos were facilitated by the very peopleCheney, etc.who we believe should be indicted. This was part of a conspiracy so they could get away with torture. But that's not the subject here now. I just want toso, that is clear to me.
Secondly, whatever we think of those memos, they're of uselessness in Europe. Europe doesn't accept this, quote, "golden shield" of a legal defense. Either it's torture or it's not. Either you did it or you didn't. And that's one of the reasons, among others, why we're going to Europe and why we went to Europe to bring these cases through the European Center.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: But I wanted to ask you about that, becauseas the clip we played of President Obama saying it's no use refighting old arguments, but you are in essence refighting arguments in Europe that the United States refuses to deal with.
MICHAEL RATNER: But, of course, you know, Cheney just showed us exactly why you have tohave to prosecute torture. Because if you don't prosecute it, the next guy down the line is going to torture again. And that's what Cheney said: "I would do it again."
And now, the European case is really interesting. We did try this in 2004you covered it here. We tried it in 2006you covered it here. But now, because of the Senate report, we have a much stronger case in Germany than we ever had, particularly with regard to a German citizen, Khalid El-Masri, who was taken off the streets of Macedonia, sent to the Salt Pit, which is known as Cobalt in the Senate report.
AMY GOODMAN: Wait, explain, though.
MICHAEL RATNER: Yeah, yeah.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us that story. It's a remarkable story. He was on a bus?
MICHAEL RATNER: He was on a bus to take a vacation in Skopje in Macedonia, and he gets pulled off by agents of our government, gets taken off the bus, gets, you know, sodomized, essentially, with a drug, and then gets taken from there to the Salt Pit in Afghanistan, which is a CIA black site torture center, known as Cobalt in the report. He's there for four months. Everybody knows byat some point along, this is a mistake. There was another guy with a similar name. It wasn't this guy. Even after they're told that it's a mistake, they leave him in there, and they leave him to be tortured. They finally, at the end of this, just take him out of there, and they drop him off somewhere
AMY GOODMAN: Condoleezza Rice was involved with this, right?
MICHAEL RATNER: Condoleezza Rice, and so was this woman
AMY GOODMAN: They held him further because they realized they had been torturing the wrong man.
MICHAEL RATNER: That's correct. And the European Court of Human Rights actually weighed in on this case. And what they did is they held Macedonia liable for allowing that kidnapping on their streets, and fined them. And they found that what happened to him on the streets of Macedonia was torture. So
AMY GOODMAN: Who else was involved?
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, weI want to go to Khalid El-Masri in his own words, describing his time inside a secret CIA prison in Afghanistan.

KHALID EL-MASRI: [translated] I was the only one in this prison in Kabul who was actually treated slightly better than the other inmates. But it was known among the prisoners that other prisoners were constantly tortured with blasts of loud music, exposed to constant onslaughts of loud music. And they werefor up to five days, they were just sort of left hanging from the ceiling, completely naked in ice-cold conditions. The man from Tanzania, whom I mentioned before, had his arm broken in three places. He had injuries, trauma to the head, and his teeth had been damaged. They also locked him up in a suitcase for long periods of time, foul-smelling suitcase that made him vomit all the time. Other people experienced forms of torture whereby their heads were being pushed down and held under water.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was Khalid El-Masri describing his torture in a CIA black site. Michael?
MICHAEL RATNER: Well, yes, and they knew he was innocent. And there's a woman who was just identifiedwho has been identified for a long time, who works for the CIA. Her name is Bikowsky, Alfreda Frances Bikowsky, who apparently was one of the people who insisted, even though there was people in the agency saying that "We've got the wrong guy," who insisted on having him picked up and taken there. She's also, apparently, one of the models for the woman in Zero Dark Thirty. And Jane Mayer recently wrote an article about her; it's, I think, called "The Queen of Torture" or something like that ["The Unidentified Queen of Torture"]didn't identify her by name. But she is one of the defendants in the lawsuit in Germany.
And let me just say, Germanywhatever happened before, between the NSA spying on Germany and the fact that their citizen has now been revealed to have been kept in a torture place, when it was known that he was innocent, I'm pretty sure that Germany is going to take this very seriously.
And I just spoke to a person you've had on here before, Scott Horton, who's the columnist for Harper's, as well as an expert on national security, and Scott tells me that because of these cases we have filed in Europe, that over a hundred CIA agents have been given advice that they should not leave the United States. Let me just say, what we're going to win here in the end, I can't say, but that already to me is a major victory.
MARTIN GARBUS: A major victory would be to prosecute the lawyers themselves
AMY GOODMAN: Martin Garbus.
MARTIN GARBUS: because otherwise what's going to happen in the future is you're going to have activities, like Cheney or whomever, you'll have people in the CIA and the NSA relying on faulty legal opinion. So I think a strong emphasis in the United States has to be stop future lawyers from doing the same thing as was done here.
JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And your point is that these memos, they consciously knew that they were violating torture statutes.
MARTIN GARBUS: They consciously knew. And I think Michael is right, of course, that they were doing it under the chain of commandCheney and the other people. But I think that's very difficult to prove, and I think you should go after the lawyers immediately now.
AMY GOODMAN: And, of course, since that time, John Yoo is an eminent professor at University of California, Berkeley, law school, and Bybee
MARTIN GARBUS: Jay Bybee is a respected federal judge. "Respected."
AMY GOODMAN: was elevated to a judgeship.

[Albert Doyle]

It seems entirely possiblethough, again, one can only speculatethat the C.I.A. overcompensated for its pre-9/11 intelligence failures by employing overly harsh measures later. Once they'd made a choice that America had never officially made beforeof sanctioning tortureit seems possible that they felt they had to defend its efficacy, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. If so, this would be worth learning. But without names, or even pseudonyms, it is almost impossible to piece together the puzzle, or hold anyone in the American government accountable. Evidently, that is exactly what the C.I.A. was fighting for during its eight-month-long redaction process, behind all those closed doors.
http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/...en-torture

You see this is the problem with mainstream criticisms of 9-11. While the article is on point about what CIA did it makes the critical mistake of betraying what its information leads to by calling these actions "failures". As Peter repeatedly points out - make no mistake these were not at all failures but were much the 'successes' of a covert cabal that intended to attack America with these false flag patsies all under the control and guidance, as pointed out in the article, of CIA. A very important distinction and NBC should drop the bullshit of not going all the way in their conclusions.