Torture by another name: CIA used 'water dousing' on at least 12 detainees. At least a dozen more people were subjected to waterboard-like tactics in CIA custody than the agency has admitted, according to a fresh accounting of the US government’s most discredited form of torture.
The CIA maintains it only subjected three detainees to waterboarding. But agency interrogators subjected at least 12 others to a similar technique, known as “water dousing”, that also created a drowning sensation or chilled a person’s body temperature – sometimes through “immersion” in water, and often without use of a board. New lawsuits, recently released documents and the Senate’s landmark torture report indicate that at least 13 men in total experienced “water dousing”. New allegations of CIA torture lodged by Guantanamo detainee. A U.S.
-educated captive at Guantánamo who has pleaded guilty to being an al-Qaida money courier has told his attorneys he was twice waterboarded by CIA agents, something not previously disclosed, according to his lawyers in a release Tuesday of once-censored torture allegations. The attorneys for Majid Khan, 35, a 1999 Maryland high school graduate who is awaiting sentencing next year at Guantánamo, that he spent much of his 2003-06 CIA captivity in solitary confinement. The first year was spent in “total darkness,” he said. through much of the first year, denied sunlight. The Strange Case of the Forgotten Gitmo Detainee - Raymond Bonner.
Since being seized in a raid in Pakistan in 2002, Abu Zubaydah has had his life controlled by American officials, first at secret sites where he was tortured, and since 2006 in a small cell in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
And, thanks to one of the strangest—and perhaps most troubling—legal cases to grow out of the War on Terror, it appears he’s not going to be leaving anytime soon, which was exactly what the CIA always intended. Today, not even his lawyers understand what’s transpired behind closed doors in a Washington, D.C., courtroom. In June 2008, the Supreme Court ruled that detainees at Guantanamo had the right to challenge their imprisonment in federal court and that their cases should be handled “promptly” by the judicial system. The next month, lawyers for Abu Zubaydah, a detainee whose torture and waterboarding in secret prisons was among the most notorious of the Bush years, filed a lawsuit in federal court challenging his detention. Senior officials gave the assurances. Victims of police torture fight for reparations.
Rally for victims of police brutality - Aug 14, 2014 [photo by Caroline Siede] Mark Clements was 16 years old when Chicago police officers took him to an interrogation room and beat him until he falsely confessed to setting a fire that killed four people.
Though his past was checkered, Clements hadn’t set the fire and he told as much to the attorney who came to oversee his confession. After the lawyer left the room, the officers returned and beat Clements again. They grabbed his testicles and squeezed until Clements once again agreed to confess. “New Torture Files”: Declassified Memos Detail Roles of Bush White House and DOJ Officials Who Conspired to Approve Torture.
An alleged CIA prison near Kabul, Afghanistan.
Image credit: Trevor Paglen via Wikimedia Commons. Last week, I wrote, both here and in the New York Times, that after reading all 828 pages of the released SSCI report on the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation program and responses to it from the CIA and Republican committee members, I had concluded that the report’s focus on whether the techniques used by the CIA were “effective” was misguided, and essentially gave a pass to too many culpable actors beyond the CIA, especially in the White House, the Cabinet, and the Justice Department.
This week, in the name of correcting the record, and thanks, ironically, to the CIA’s own effort to defend itself, I want to place blame where it rightly belongs – with the CIA, to be sure, but also with specific high-level officials and lawyers outside the agency who were directly involved in reviewing the CIA’s tactics, and either said yes or failed to say no. Some Torture Facts. At the request of some on Twitter, I’m bringing together a Twitter rant of some facts on torture here. 1) Contrary to popular belief, torture was not authorized primarily by the OLC memos John Yoo wrote.
It was first authorized by the September 17, 2001 Memorandum of Notification crafted by Cofer Black. See details on the structure and intent of that Finding here. The CIA's Dirty Playbook Is About to Be Opened. A long-awaited Senate report won’t use the word ‘torture’ to describe the CIA’s interrogations.
But it will show abuse that is horrific, systematic, and widespread. The White House is set to give Congress on Friday the final, declassified version of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s majority report on CIA interrogation. And according to one person who has reviewed the document and three people who were briefed on its contents, the committee’s report will reveal new and shocking details about the CIA’s detention, rendition, and interrogation program in the years following the 9/11 attacks.
After 16 years, CIA declassifies new portions of "KUBARK" interrogation manual. James Mitchell: 'I'm just a guy who got asked to do something for his country' Dr James Elmer Mitchell has been called a war criminal and a torturer.
He has been the subject of an ethics complaint, and his methods have been criticized in reports by two congressional committees and by the CIA's internal watchdog. But the retired air force psychologist insists he is not the monster many have portrayed him to be. Revealed: Inside the Senate report on CIA interrogations. A still-classified report on the CIA's interrogation program established in the wake of 9/11 sparked a furious row last week between the agency and Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein.
Al Jazeera has learned from sources familiar with its contents that the committee's report alleges that at least one high-value detainee was subjected to torture techniques that went beyond those authorized by George W. Bush's Justice Department. Two Senate staffers and a U.S. official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the information they disclosed remains classified, told Al Jazeera that the committee's analysis of 6 million pages of classified records also found that some of the harsh measures authorized by the Department of Justice had been applied to at least one detainee before such legal authorization was received. The Intelligence Committee probe began in 2009 after allegations that detainees had been tortured in CIA captivity after the 9/11 attacks.
Sen. Torture and Dual Loyalty. Medical, Military, and Ethics Experts Say Health Professionals Designed and Participated in Cruel, Inhumane, and Degrading Treatment and Torture of Detainees; Seek Policies To Assure Conformance With Ethical Principles New York, NY — An independent panel of military, ethics, medical, public health, and legal experts today charged that U.S. military and intelligence agencies directed doctors and psychologists working in U.S. military detention centers to violate standard ethical principles and medical standards to avoid infliction of harm.
The Task Force on Preserving Medical Professionalism in National Security Detention Centers (see attached) concludes that since September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense (DoD) and CIA improperly demanded that U.S. military and intelligence agency health professionals collaborate in intelligence gathering and security practices in a way that inflicted severe harm on detainees in U.S. custody. Task Force Members: Scott A. George J. Richard N. For Real: Torture America Style. On October 7, 2003, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act request for all documents related to post-9/11 detention and interrogation practices. The request was filed simultaneously with the Defense Department, the State Department, the Justice Department and the Central Intelligence Agency.
By the following May, no response had been issued, so the ACLU filed a second request, and in June took the government to court in hopes of forcing it to comply. US Public Opinion on Torture, the Iraq War, and Civil Liberties, New findings from Retro Poll. BERKELEY -- May 5 -- In a series of polls by Retro Poll 72-89 percent of the American public consistently opposed the use of torture by the U.S. government. A recent poll by the Gallup organization confirmed these results. In a new poll completed May 1st Retro Poll has found that 67.3 percent of those polled knew torture is against U.S. laws and a war crime. But many people remained unaware that their government is systematically employing torture. Reckoning with Torture. Guantanamo. AbuGhraib. Torture allegations in North Carolina prison - Charlotte City Buzz. The warden of North Carolina's Central Prison, Warden Gerald J. Branker has retired amid allegations of torture of inmates.
The Associated Press first reported a situation on Monday that a June 2011 review by the N.C. Lee County Deputies Tied Suspect to a Chair, Gagged Him, and Pepper-Sprayed Him to Death. US Torture: Voices from the Black Sites by Mark Danner. ICRC Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody by the International Committee of the Red Cross 43 pp., February 2007 We need to get to the bottom of what happened—and why—so we make sure it never happens again.1 —Senator Patrick Leahy, Chairman, Senate Judiciary Committee We think time and elections will cleanse our fallen world but they will not. Since November, George W. CIA: Zubaydah's Torture Drawings, "Should They Exist," to Remain Top Secret.
In 2002, not long after he was subjected to so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" by Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell, psychologists under contract to the CIA, high-value detainee Abu Zubaydah made about ten drawings depicting the torture he endured while in custody of the agency. The drawings Zubaydah made were classified as top secret by the CIA. Special Prosecutor Declines to File Criminal Charges Over Destruction of CIA Torture Tapes. Government Recants Major Terror Claims Against "High-Value" Detainee Abu Zubaydah. John Rizzo: CIA’s Enhanced Interrogation “Necessary and Effective” US detention post-9/11: Birth of a debacle. Days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration started making decisions that led to the official authorisation of torture tactics, indefinite incommunicado detention and the denial of habeas corpus for people who would be detained at Guantánamo, Bagram, or "black sites" (secret prisons) run by the CIA; kidnappings, forced disappearances and extraordinary rendition to foreign countries to exploit their torturing services.
While some of those practices were cancelled when Barack Obama took office in January 2009, others continue to characterise US detention policy in the "war on terror". Feinstein: Senate Panel's Probe of CIA Torture Program Concludes It Was "Far More Widespread and Systematic Than We Thought" Filling in the Gaping Holes in WikiLeaks' Guantanamo Detainee Files. Imagine that the more than 700 Guantanamo files released two weeks ago by WikiLeaks contained information explaining how interrogators obtained "intelligence" from "war on terror" detainees captured or sold to US forces after 9/11, such as this firsthand account:
Torture, and impunity in US courts. New York, NY - An important question confronting courts in the United States is whether individuals subjected to torture and other abuse in the "war on terror" can obtain a judicial remedy for their mistreatment. Out of Guantanamo, into an Egyptian jail. As parliamentary elections begin in Egypt, Reprieve's Life After Guantanamo team is working against the clock for the luckless Egyptian ex-Guantanamo prisoner Adel al-Gazzar, now re-imprisoned in Cairo.
From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads. Romania CIA Prison: Central Intelligence Agency Used Secret Makeshift Prison For Its Most Valuable Detainees. US detention policy: Exposing the dark side. Days after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, the Bush administration started making decisions that led to the official authorisation of torture tactics, indefinite incommunicado detention and the denial of habeas corpus for people who would be detained at Guantánamo, Bagram, or "black sites" (secret prisons) run by the CIA, kidnappings, forced disappearances and extraordinary rendition to foreign countries to exploit their torturing services.
While some of those practices were canceled when Barack Obama took office in January 2009, others continue to characterise US detention policy in the "war on terror". 10 Years Later, 9/11 Commission Says President Is Failing to Protect Civil Liberties. Jeremy Scahill Reveals CIA Facility, Prison in Somalia as U.S. Expands Covert Ops in Stricken Nation. APA “Casebook” on Psychologist Ethics and Interrogations Fails to Convince. Suleiman: The CIA's man in Cairo. Using Evidence from Water Torture to Hold Detainees at Guantanamo. Role of Torture in Finding Bin Laden: What We Actually Know.
Investigating the Bush Administration's Rendition Detention Interrogation Program. Gitmo Doctors Hid Evidence of Torture. Torture, Cover-Up At Gitmo? Iraq: Secret Jail Uncovered in Baghdad. Medical Professionals Bending Ethics in Terror War - by Abid Aslam. Human Rights Watch - Jeremy Scahill: Bush administration authorized ‘sick torture tactics’ New Evidence Reveals US Military Used Waterboarding-Style Torture, Despite Rumsfeld’s Denials. Eric Holder Announces Full DOJ Investigation Into Deaths Of Two Individuals In CIA Custody. Torture crimes officially, permanently shielded - Glenn Greenwald. Supreme Court declines to take up Abu Ghraib detainee lawsuit. ‘Some Will Call Me a Torturer’: CIA Man Reveals Secret Jail.
A memo on torture to John Yoo. CIA Tactics Endorsed In Secret Memos. Bush Admits Approving Torture. Bush's Swiss visit off after complaints on torture. 06-24 Danish human rights actvist Alkhawaja. Prison letter details torture. Life in peril. #Bahrain. When mistaken identity leads to torture - 9/11 - Salon.com -
Scotland Yard Report Finds British Citizen Was Tortured in Secret CIA Site - Raymond Bonner - International. Afghan inmates 'abused' at US-run Bagram prison. Torture's Other Victims: US Soldiers. Former Military Interrogator Matthew Alexander: Despite GOP Claims, "Immoral" Torture "Slowed Down" Effort to Find Osama bin Laden. Stephen Soldz: Army Interrogators on Torture. Honoring Those Who Said No to Torture.