U.S. Engaged in Torture After 9/11, Review Concludes

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U.S. Engaged in Torture After 9/11, Review Concludes

U.S. Engaged in Torture After 9/11, Review Concludes

By SCOTT SHANE

Published: April 16, 2013


WASHINGTON — A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

The sweeping, 577-page report says that while brutality has occurred in every American war, there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.” The study, by an 11-member panel convened by the Constitution Project, a legal research and advocacy group, is to be released on Tuesday morning.
Debate over the coercive interrogation methods used by the administration of President George W. Bush has often broken down on largely partisan lines. The Constitution Project’s task force on detainee treatment, led by two former members of Congress with experience in the executive branch — a Republican, Asa Hutchinson, and a Democrat, James R. Jones — seeks to produce a stronger national consensus on the torture question.
While the task force did not have access to classified records, it is the most ambitious independent attempt to date to assess the detention and interrogation programs. A separate 6,000-page report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s record by the Senate Intelligence Committee, based exclusively on agency records, rather than interviews, remains classified.
“As long as the debate continues, so too does the possibility that the United States could again engage in torture,” the report says.
The use of torture, the report concludes, has “no justification” and “damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive.” The task force found “no firm or persuasive evidence” that these interrogation methods produced valuable information that could not have been obtained by other means. While “a person subjected to torture might well divulge useful information,” much of the information obtained by force was not reliable, the report says.
Interrogation and abuse at the C.I.A.’s so-called black sites, the Guantánamo Bay prison in Cuba and war-zone detention centers, have been described in considerable detail by the news media and in declassified documents, though the Constitution Project report adds many new details.
It confirms a report by Human Rights Watch that one or more Libyan militants were waterboarded by the C.I.A., challenging the agency’s longtime assertion that only three Al Qaeda prisoners were subjected to the near-drowning technique. It includes a detailed account by Albert J. Shimkus Jr., then a Navy captain who ran a hospital for detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison, of his own disillusionment when he discovered what he considered to be the unethical mistreatment of prisoners.
But the report’s main significance may be its attempt to assess what the United States government did in the years after 2001 and how it should be judged. The C.I.A. not only waterboarded prisoners, but slammed them into walls, chained them in uncomfortable positions for hours, stripped them of clothing and kept them awake for days on end.
The question of whether those methods amounted to torture is a historically and legally momentous issue that has been debated for more than a decade inside and outside the government. The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel wrote a series of legal opinions from 2002 to 2005 concluding that the methods were not torture if used under strict rules; all the memos were later withdrawn. News organizations have wrestled with whether to label the brutal methods unequivocally as torture in the face of some government officials’ claims that they were not.
In addition, the United States is a signatory to the international Convention Against Torture, which requires the prompt investigation of allegations of torture and the compensation of its victims.
Like the still-secret Senate interrogation report, the Constitution Project study was initiated after President Obama decided in 2009 not to support a national commission to investigate the post-9/11 counterterrorism programs, as proposed by Senator Patrick J. Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, and others. Mr. Obama said then that he wanted to “look forward, not backward.” Aides have said he feared that his own policy agenda might get sidetracked in a battle over his predecessor’s programs.

(Page 2 of 2)
The panel studied the treatment of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, in Afghanistan and Iraq, and at the C.I.A’s secret prisons. Staff members, including the executive director, Neil A. Lewis, a former reporter for The New York Times, traveled to multiple detention sites and interviewed dozens of former American and foreign officials, as well as former detainees.

Mr. Hutchinson, who served in the Bush administration as chief of the Drug Enforcement Administration and under secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said he “took convincing” on the torture issue. But after the panel’s nearly two years of research, he said he had no doubts about what the United States did.
“This has not been an easy inquiry for me, because I know many of the players,” Mr. Hutchinson said in an interview. He said he thought everyone involved in decisions, from Mr. Bush down, had acted in good faith, in a desperate effort to try to prevent more attacks.
“But I just think we learn from history,” Mr. Hutchinson said. “It’s incredibly important to have an accurate account not just of what happened but of how decisions were made.”
He added, “The United States has a historic and unique character, and part of that character is that we do not torture.”
The panel found that the United States violated its international legal obligations by engineering “enforced disappearances” and secret detentions. It questions recidivism figures published by the Defense Intelligence Agency for Guantánamo detainees who have been released, saying they conflict with independent reviews.
It describes in detail the ethical compromise of government lawyers who offered “acrobatic” advice to justify brutal interrogations and medical professionals who helped direct and monitor them. And it reveals an internal debate at the International Committee of the Red Cross over whether the organization should speak publicly about American abuses; advocates of going public lost the fight, delaying public exposure for months, the report finds.
Mr. Jones, a former ambassador to Mexico, noted that his panel called for the release of a declassified version of the Senate report and said he believed that the two reports, one based on documents and the other largely on interviews, would complement each other in documenting what he called a grave series of policy errors.
“I had not recognized the depths of torture in some cases,” Mr. Jones said. “We lost our compass.”
While the Constitution Project report covers mainly the Bush years, it is critical of some Obama administration policies, especially what it calls excessive secrecy. It says that keeping the details of rendition and torture from the public “cannot continue to be justified on the basis of national security” and urges the administration to stop citing state secrets to block lawsuits by former detainees.
The report calls for the revision of the Army Field Manual on interrogation to eliminate Appendix M, which it says would permit an interrogation for 40 consecutive hours, and to restore an explicit ban on stress positions and sleep manipulation.
The core of the report, however, may be an appendix: a detailed 22-page legal and historical analysis that explains why the task force concluded that what the United States did was torture. It offers dozens of legal cases in which similar treatment was prosecuted in the United States or denounced as torture by American officials when used by other countries.
The report compares the torture of detainees to the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. “What was once generally taken to be understandable and justifiable behavior,” the report says, “can later become a case of historical regret.”
source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/16/world ... l?hpw&_r=0


A non-partisan congressional review has FINALLY indicted Bush JR and most of the Bush administration staff, Clinton and many of his administration, and the Obama administration and his top staff as war criminals.


So while everyone is fixated on Boston this has gone unnoticed #-o


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Re: U.S. Engaged in Torture After 9/11, Review Concludes

Um, two former members of Congress writing a long research doesn't exactly scream a legal indictment as war criminals..
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Re: U.S. Engaged in Torture After 9/11, Review Concludes

Ra wrote:Um, two former members of Congress writing a long research doesn't exactly scream a legal indictment as war criminals..

The evidence is there for an indictment to stick. besides, Bush and some of the others named in the report publicly stated they ordered torture and would do it again....by their own mouths they are criminals.

Part of the indictment:

"the task force amassed an enormous and overwhelming quantity of evidence on US crimes, the reports introduction contains this indictment of the American governments conduct on the so called war on terror". the report goes on from there.

Tuesday, April 16, 2013



The Unintended Consequences of the Boston Massacre: THE SPECIFIC INDICTMENT of Bush Jr/Obama/CIA/US Military “Torture of 9/11 Prisoners” at GITMO—FINALLY CONFIRMED as a “WAR CRIME”-- Equivalent to Prosecuted Nazi War Crimes and the Torture/ Internship Of Japanese Americans During WWII.


Nothing beats a sensational front page news story like a Boston Marathon Massacre! Most readers would miss the incidental but far more serious implication for the moral compass of America than the NY Times story by Scott Shane, entitled, “U.S. Practiced Torture After 9/11, Non Partisan Review Concludes”. (posted earlier)
In this article, both Asa Hutchinson [Republican/Bush Jr Administration] and James R. Jones [Democrat, Congress] indict the interrogation and tortures committed by Presidents Clinton [Rendition], Bush Jr [full menu of tortures], Obama [Bush Jr in Black Face].
In essence, this bipartisan report, along with 6,000 pages of still classified docs IMPLICATES THREE ADMINISTRATIONS of INTERNATIONAL WAR CRIMES—RENDITION, TORTURE, ENHANCED INTERROGATION.
What does this mean in the midst of our frenzy to find ‘supposed terrorists’ of the Boston Marathon Massacre?
It means that, as I have previously repeated time and time again, we have had and still have Presidents who have willingly committed acts of International War Crimes Punishable by Death and / or Life Imprisonment.
Furthermore, to make matters even worse, the extensive investigations showed that the abominable, criminal activities of interrogation, torture, water boarding committed by the CIA, US military, US mercenaries and sanctioned by three presidents were like the wars themselves- totally useless.
In short, the USA is GUILTY of COMMITTING USELESS WAR CRIMES!!!
Have I, an experienced counter –terrorist expert with thirty years experience who had never had to touch even one detainee, let alone torture or ‘interrogate’ anyone, suddenly had a fit of righteous indignation or just decided to vent his RELENTLESS FURY for UNREPENTANT SINS of our THREE PRESIDENTS and their MINIONS?
The answer lies not in the headlines nor in the hysterical media distractions of a tragic occurrence which I might have been able to predict (I think Patriarch did predict this), had I known beforehand that this report would come out on the same day as the BOSTON MARATHON.
That’s right! You’ve got it! Once again, Obama in concert with FEMA, CIA, FBI, and other National Security minions—the usual ‘choir boy suspects’—decided to OFFER A DISTRACTION.
Bloody! Macabre! Inane!! Insensitive!
But please place this Boston Marathon along side the sacrifices that Bush jr was willing to make in terms of dead American bodies in 9/11—close to 3,000 innocent Americans in the World Trade Center alone. The Boston Marathon Massacre is small potatoes in the theater of distractions for war crimes.
A decade ago, Bush Jr had no qualms, of course along with his close pal Cheney, of sacrificing a few thousand US military men in the useless Iraq War. Don’t forget the hundreds of thousands of innocent Pakistanis, Yemenis, Afghanis, and Iraqis that Obama, Panetta, Tenet, Hayden, Brennan et al, are willing to sacrifice in the name of ‘terror’ or, excuse me, the ‘war on terror’.
So what’s a few Americans who were killed and injured in the Marathon Race? Nothing, really, in comparison to the full scope of the extent of the horror that Clinton, Bush jr and Obama collectively had engaged in maiming the innocent; torturing the prisoners; injuring and killing the countless thousands of innocent civilians; destroying societies and countries; and creating world wide MAYHEM and CHAOS—all for the sake of NATIONAL SECURITY??
Let me be more precise and list some of the issues that are relevant to the ‘torture’, ‘interrogation’ and ‘the legal consequences’ of those actions over a thirty year period since the Clinton Administration.
But first let’s go back, a bit further to WWII.
--A Japanese General was summarily executed by the US allies for waterboarding pilots who had been caught in the Jimmy DoLittle Raid on Tokyo.
-- US Army soldiers during the Vietnam War summarily placed in prison for waterboarding Viet Cong prisoners of war.
--In 1948, Norwegians executed German SS officers practicing ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ called ‘Versharfte Vernehmung’ developed by Gestapo Chief Heinrich Muller, using ‘sleep deprivation’, ‘extreme cold’, ‘suspension in stress positions’ and ‘deliberate exhaustion’.
--Navy Captain Albert Shimkus Jr, who ran a hospital for the prisoners at Gitmo protested the unethical behavior.
-- Bill Clinton, Sandy Berger approved rendition.
--Bush jr, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Condi, Steve Hadley, Elliot Abrams, Gen. David Petraeus, Jose Rodriguez [head of CIA Covert operations], John Brennan, David Addington [WH staff], all approved the use of severe interrogation methods including hypothermia, waterboarding, stress positions, abdominal beatings, genital torture, and other bodily and psychological harm according to Department of Justice Concurrence of Attorney General John Ashcroft as written in the paper by John Yoo. Also concurring to these aforementioned methods were NSA Director General Michael Hayden, SecState Collin Powell, and DCI George Tenet .
--The only official to dissent officially and was subsequently reprimanded was Philip Zelikow, PhD who wrote a memo contesting the DOJ’s Torture Memo written by John Yoo and others in “Justice”.
-- Karl Rove told BBC in 2010: ”I’m proud that we kept the world safer than it was, by the use of these techniques. They’re appropriate, they’re in conformity with our international requirements and with US law”.
--Cheney: ” I was and remain a strong proponent of our enhanced interrogation program.”
--Congresswoman, later Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi [D, Cal. San Francisco] in a meeting with the CIA/Bush Jr Administration—WHOLEHEARTEDLY SUPPORTED ENHANCED INTERROGATION AND TORTURE!
There goes our in-house LIBERAL—ALL THE WAY WITH TORTURE, PRINCESS NANCY! What happened to the infamous University of Berkley WAR PROTESTORS-IT’S ONE OF YOUR OWN !!! And what about your Pacific Heights Liberal Constituents? Do they know that you are true blue SADIST and WAR CRIMINAL?
--But Congresswoman Jane Harmon also from California and a Democratic Liberal had the guts to dissent and object. But she was in the minority.
--James Steele, in charge of the US Death Squads [Paramilitary] in El Salvador where 75,000 civilians were killed was placed by Cheney and Rumsfeld as ‘OUR MAN IN IRAQ’ to train the counter insurgency. Also involved with Elliot Abrams and Ollie North in the Iran Contra Affair. War criminal!!!
-- Jose A, Rodriguez Jr, the former Director of the National Clandestine Service for the CIA [served 31 years] and author of “Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives”
This Puerto Rican “Torture Wonder” from the University of Florida could not stop lauding his incredible efforts at engaging in constant torture of 9/11 victims to such an extent that he rode the celebrity circuit promoting his book of absurd observations: ”About 30 out of the 100 or so detainees that the CIA held were subjected to some harsh treatment.”
It’s this same ‘pobrecito’ who literally gave dictation to Kathryn Bigelow for her fictional film rendition of ‘Zero Dark Thirty’ and then after being reprimanded by me in an email to my contacts, Jose quickly recanted his story. What an dishonorable, cowardly pobrecito!!!
General David Petraeus, who would become the DC I and tried to distance himself from Steele was deeply involved and knowledgeable about the torture and paramilitary death squads in Iraq. My bad!!
Even yours truly could be fooled by the presumed integrity of a man who had been shot by his friend on a shooting range and claimed that he was the innovator of the thousand year old counter insurgency theory. What a liar, well, someone saw fit to put Petraeus in his proper place of ignominy. Too bad for the honorable men and women who served him and were fooled by him as I was. Petraeus is an example of how rampant sociopathy and self aggrandizement rages through our so called warrior leaders.
BTW, in most cases of enhanced interrogation, one often needs the presence or advice of a physician, psychiatrist or psychologist. I would recommend consulting my former psychiatric colleague who presents himself as an expert in the mind of a terrorist- Dr. Jerry Post. He also trained at Harvard Medical College. However, unlike myself, he was the founder and director of the Center for the Analysis of Personality and Political Behavior at the CIA for over 20 years. In fact, he was so good at questioning terrorists or suspected terrorists that he was awarded the Intelligence Medal of Merit in 1979 and received the studies in Intelligence Award in 1980! Atta boy! He then received the Nevitt Sanford Award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Political Psychology in 2002. He was a consultant for the CIA for a long time and probably still is! He presently resides as many academic CIA assets do at the George Washington University Department of Political Psychology on E Street in DC. I am certain he knows a lot more about enhanced interrogation than any other psychiatrist or medical doctor….including me!

By now, my dear readers, I am certain you get the idea.
Falls flags galore. Deaths abound. Non-deaths are opine as in Sandy Hook. At least, in the Boston Massacre, one can see how much of a ‘false flag’, Sandy Hook was, without any pictures of blood, guts and death. Remember that scene in Chicago where you have to razzle-dazzle them??? Distraction from the REAL story.
But the point is quite simple!
Once again, Executive tyranny reigns supreme over our Republic.
It started with Slick Willy and Rendition and his corrupt political and economic cronyism. Then it accelerated and deteriorated with Bush Jr and company.
And now the President of “NON-TRANSPARENCY” and “NIXONIAN SECRECY” and “DRONE WARS” has continued the slide of our republic into a criminal civilization worthy of an international tribunal placing our leaders in jail or worse.
As for me, as I once said to a former governor who accused me of tyranny acting against his brother, Bush Jr, I replied very calmly, “In times of tyranny, treason is PATRIOTISM”!!!

Source: http://pieczenik.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04 ... oston.html
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