Never Be Silent

Online Training: Counter Terror with Justice

In the name of the “war on terror,” the U.S. government has subjected people who have not been charged with or convicted of any crime to torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment.  Amnesty International believes that the new US administration and Congress must hold all perpetrators accountable in order to guarantee that human rights will never again be sacrificed in the name of national security.

Use this online training module to:

• educate yourself and others about torture
• brief elected officials on the issue
• plan events with your local Amnesty groups and chapters

Upon completion of the training, you will be able to articulate Amnesty International’s stance on torture, cite facts and refer to specific cases to support Amnesty International’s stance, define torture, respond to other viewpoints, and identify concrete actions to support the Counter Terror with Justice Campaign.

The module is self-paced with an audio guide, interactive case studies, and reference section for additional learning and ease of use.

From Amnesty International, in its entirety:

The UN Convention Against Torture defines torture as “…the intentional infliction of severe physical or mental pain or suffering for purposes such as obtaining information or a confession, or punishing, intimidating or coercing someone.” Torture is always illegal. “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.”

Abuse of prisoners doesn’t have to be torture to be illegal. Cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment (CID) is also illegal under international and U.S. law. CID includes any harsh or neglectful treatment that could damage a detainee’s physical or mental health or any punishment intended to cause physical or mental pain or suffering, or to humiliate or degrade the person being punished.

While it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between torture and CID, there are two key differences. First, torture constitutes a more severe degree of pain or suffering. Second, torture is the result of a deliberate and purposeful act aimed at imposing great suffering, while CID could be the result of accident or neglect. Both torture and CID are illegal.

In the years since 9/11, the U.S. government has repeatedly violated both international and domestic prohibitions on torture and CID in the name of fighting terrorism.

• The Bush Administration decided the Geneva Conventions would not apply to detainees held in Guantánamo Bay (a decision later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court) Article III of the Geneva Convention
• The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel produced a series of “torture memos,” which mutilated the law so as to restrict the definition of CID and to make certain torture practices seem legal under U.S. law;
• U.S. interrogations of suspects in the “war on terror” have included such cruel and inhuman techniques as prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation, intimidation by the use of a dog, sexual and other humiliation, stripping, hooding, the use of loud music, white noise, and exposure to extreme temperatures;
• The CIA used waterboarding – illegal as torture under international and U.S. law – to interrogate three “high-value” detainees;
• The U.S. began to send detainees for interrogation to countries known to use torture;
• President Bush admitted that several high-level officials in his Administration met secretly to authorize specific interrogation methods otherwise prohibited.

Numerous instances of torture and CID by U.S. personnel – confirmed by U.S. officials who took part in or witnessed these events – have been fed by a climate of impunity and the failure of either the executive branch or Congress to conduct a comprehensive, impartial, and independent investigation into detention policies and practices.

This has had a corrosive effect on respect for human rights around the world. The U.S. has lost influence over the behavior of other governments. U.S. misconduct has encouraged others to feel they have license to violate international law. And these practices make U.S. citizens vulnerable to abusive treatment when they are abroad.

Amnesty International is calling on the United States to adhere to its own professed values and help strengthen, instead of weaken, international compliance with universal standards of human rights.

From the Huffington Post, excerpt:

BAGHDAD — The Iraqi reporter who threw his shoes at former President George W. Bush in protest was freed from prison on Tuesday and, unrepentant, he harshly condemned the U.S. presence in his country and accused authorities of torturing him.

Muntadhar al-Zeidi’s stunning act of protest in December made him a hero for many in and outside Iraq. It struck a chord with millions in the Arab and Muslim worlds who have been captivated and angered by daily images of destruction and grieving since the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.

But nine months later, there was little public outpouring of support for him, a sign of how things have changed.

Since the incident, U.S. forces have pulled back from Iraq’s cities, significantly lowering the profile of the U.S. military ahead of a planned full withdrawal from the country.

Also, Barack Obama – seen by many Muslims as more sympathetic to their cause – is now in the White House in place of Bush, whom many blamed for unleashing Iraq’s turmoil. Moreover, with some improvements in security, some Iraqis are undecided on whether the invasion was an unmitigated evil as many long depicted it.

A spokesman who works for Bush in his Dallas office declined to comment Tuesday.

Talking to reporters after his release, al-Zeidi said he only wanted to avenge his country’s humiliation.

“Here I am, free, but my country remains captive,” he said. “I confess that I am no hero, but I was humiliated to see my country violated, my Baghdad burn and my people killed.”

From the Telegraph, in its entirety:

The medical ethics group has investigated the role of doctors and psychologists, in alleged cases of torture at Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo, Bagram and other US detention sites where the worst abuses appear to have taken place.

“They were experimenting and keeping records of the results” said Steven Reisner, co-author of the report, Aiding Torture.

“That in itself is a war crime under the Geneva Conventions.”

The Physicians for Human Rights report accuses unnamed doctors, nurses and psychologists of being “involved at every stage in the development, implementation and legitimisation of this torture programme.”

It based its conclusions on the recently released CIA Inspector General’s report which, it says, revealed that US medical personnel facilitated and monitored aggressive the aggressive use of waterboarding. The 2004 CIA report was finally published two weeks ago by court order.

The allegations of human experimentation on detainees are particularly explosive because of the practices of Nazi doctors who were prosecuted at Nuremberg in 1947. International human rights law forbids torture and any human experimentation on prisoners.

A US special prosecutor is already investigating whether interrogators bypassed guidelines set by the Bush Administration while waterboarding terrorist suspects.

Doctors have a legal duty of care towards detainees and could fall foul of the special prosecutor’s investigation if it is proven that they facilitated torture or conducted experiments to enhance its effectiveness.

CIA guidelines also called for medical personnel, including a psychologist and doctor to be present during the use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” such as waterboarding. The human rights group says that this put medics in the untenable position of “calibrating harm” rather than protecting and healing.

The ethics group argues that medical personnel who were involved in this programme should be the subject to inde­pendent investigation for both criminal and unprofessional conduct on the basis that they were involved in “possible unethical human experi­mentation.”

According to Mr Reisner, “doctors are certainly guilty of war crimes for permitting torture to go forward and overseeing it while they had the authority to stop it.”

Psychologists working for the CIA went further, he said, and gathering statistics on the amount of water used during waterboarding and the time prisoner were subjected to it. “That is experimentation and as such is a war crime,” he said.

A leaked investigation by the International Committee of the Red Cross revealed that CIA medical staff probably used a pulse oxymeter, to monitor the oxygen saturation of prisoners as they were being subjected to waterboarding. The ICRC condemned this as a “gross breach of medical ethics”.

From Salon, University of Michigan historian Juan Cole says our laws need to “more clearly forbid brutality.” In its entirety:

The thing that concerns me most about the investigation of Central Intelligence Agency interrogators is that U.S. law served as such a poor guide to them for what was permitted.

Although administrations do break laws, I think if Congress had had the courage and the energy to actually enact clear statutes on torture, the CIA interrogators would have been much better served. The 2005 McCain amendment was so watered down and so easily interpreted away as to produce the opposite of the effect intended; then McCain himself went on to defend torture in order to curry favor with the far right in his presidential bid. Bush vetoed the last attempt at better anti-torture legislation in spring of 2008. The Democrats may only have a brief window through November of 2010 to get effective and unambiguous legislation on the books, and now we have a president who won’t veto it.

Note that one of the interrogators is said to have feared prosecution before the World Court in the Hague. But why weren’t they afraid of prosecution in U.S. courts? When did the U.S. go from having, in the Bill of Rights, among the most advanced human rights laws in the world to being a gulag backwater where it is only a trip to Holland that American torturers fear?

It is the ambiguity of U.S. law on these matters that allowed John Yoo to offer those bizarre opinions, as White House counsel, as to what interrogators could do. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is toothless and largely ineffectual except as a vague set of ideals. It needn’t be that way.

The Obama administration has forbidden waterboarding. But as long as these things are done by administrative fiat, they can easily be undone. There should be a law.

A law would help the courts hold high-up politicians to account. Dick Cheney has been vocal about torture saving lives precisely because he wants to affect the climate of public opinion before he goes up on charges. As things now stand, it is only some schmucks at the very bottom of the system that get punished, not the people actually giving the orders (even if by a wink and a handshake).

Even the old principle that Congress declares the wars has been made antiquated by the rise of modern police actions and guerrilla campaigns, which are not viewed by Congress as wars. As a result, the executive can single-handedly insert us into foreign wars, something the Founding Fathers wanted to forbid in the Constitution. The war powers of presidents need to be more carefully revised and crafted.

Likewise, the kind of U.S.-sponsored coups in other countries that Steve Kinzer has chronicled in his “Overthrow” take place in a legal limbo. Can the president order the Directorate of Operations to just get rid of the government of a foreign country? I repeat that it is not only the sheer act (and who would not have applauded a U.S.-backed successful coup against Adolph Hitler if it could have been arranged?), but the extra-legal context in which the agency is made to operate.

If more of the covert side of the U.S. government is not encompassed by legislation, then every time a right-wing government gets in, it will just go back to Bushism. Or worse.

From the Washington Independent, excerpt:

On the same day that the government produced the 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on interrogations, it also turned over seven more memos and letters from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel. The memos released on Monday were the Justice Department’s legal justifications for continuing to use those controversial interrogation techniques, despite a new law passed by Congress and an intervening landmark Supreme Court ruling that governs U.S. detentions overseas.

The Office of Legal Counsel is where John Yoo and Jay Bybee, beginning in 2002, wrote a series of what came to be called the “torture memos,” defining torture so narrowly and the law so permissively that near-drowning, prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions and many more “enhanced interrogation techniques” were deemed legal. Yoo also concluded that the Bill of Rights didn’t apply to certain executive action during wartime, even in the United States.

The more recent documents, written by Steven Bradbury, who became acting assistant attorney general and head of the OLC in 2005, were the Justice Department’s attempts to deal with the ways the law had changed in the intervening years – and the clarifications from the Supreme Court that certain basic international laws, like portions of the Geneva Conventions, do apply to terror suspects held abroad.

What experts say is surprising about the 2006 and 2007 memos released on Monday, however, is how little the legal analysis changed, despite the new legal backdrop that had emerged, and how selectively the lawyers chose which laws and cases to apply.

In 2005, after photographs surfaced showing U.S. troops abusing Iraqi inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act specifically to outlaw the “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” of detainees that was plain for all to see. The next year, the Supreme Court ruled in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to “war on terror” detainees. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales had famously called the Geneva Conventions a “quaint” relic of the past.

But the CIA still wanted to use many of the controversial interrogation techniques it had adopted, based in part on the advice of two psychologists and businessmen with no interrogation experience. In particular, as is set forth in the recently released Office of Legal Counsel memos, the CIA still wanted to use six techniques, including prolonged sleep deprivation, food deprivation, shackling, forced standing in stress positions, and a variety of “corrective techniques” that include physical slaps and grabs – all of which would be used alone, or in combination.

From the Washington Post, excerpts:

TEHRAN, Aug. 25 — The attorney prosecuting leading opposition figures in Iran asked a court Tuesday to give them “the maximum punishment,” offering the clearest indication to date that the government crackdown against the organizers of protests this summer could include executions.

The defendants, who include former deputy ministers and a former presidential spokesman, are accused of endangering national security in the aftermath of the disputed June presidential election. If convicted, their parties will be banned.

The session was the fourth in a large-scale trial of opposition figures, who belong to parties locked in a power struggle with hard-liners since the 1979 Islamic revolution.

A party connected to the opposition called the trials “a scandalous play.”

“This ridiculous show was staged to provide legitimacy for the coup government,” the Islamic Iran Participation Front said in a statement posted on the Norooznews Web site.

The request for maximum punishments reflects the determination of a group of Revolutionary Guard Corps commanders, Friday prayer leaders and lawmakers supportive of the government to prosecute their political enemies for disputing President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s election victory…

Meanwhile, the director of the vast Behest-e Zahra cemetery in Tehran was fired Tuesday after a parliamentary commission visited to investigate claims that 44 protesters killed in the post-election unrest were buried there in unmarked graves, the Parlemannews Web site reported.

The report did not cite a reason for Mahmoud Rezaian’s dismissal, but several Web sites have shown clips of 44 gravestones at the cemetery without names but with burial codes.

On Monday, Rezaian denied that any unmarked graves existed. “Illegal, secret night burials of bodies at this cemetery are rumors and untrue,” he told the semiofficial Mehr News Agency.

The reports of unmarked graves surfaced after a controversy in which several detained demonstrators died in prison, leading the supreme leader to shut down the facility. Karroubi, the defeated candidate, met with the commission Monday and presented evidence that prisoners had been raped, according to his party’s Web site. His opponents say he fabricated the allegations.

From the Huffington Post/AP, excerpts:

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) - An Iranian opposition leader on Monday released what he said was an account by a prisoner raped by his jailers in a challenge to the country’s leadership which has sought to silence claims of torture and abuses in the postelection crackdown.

The allegations of torture and even rapes against imprisoned opposition protesters have become a source of embarrassment to the government of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Iran’s clerical leadership as they try to put behind them the turmoil of the disputed June presidential election.

Hundreds of protesters and opposition politicians and activists were arrested when security forces crushed the mass protests that erupted after the opposition claimed the June 12 vote was rigged in favor of Ahmadinejad and that pro-reform challenger Mir Hossein Mousavi was the true winner. The opposition says at least 69 people were killed in the crackdown, including some who died from torture in prison.

In recent weeks, hard-line government supporters have fiercely denounced senior opposition figure Mahdi Karroubi after he announced earlier this month that he had received reports that detainees were raped and tortured to death.

On Monday, Karroubi responded by making public for the first time details of one of the accounts. In a statement on his party’s Web site, he warned he would release more accounts unless authorities stop denying his claims…

The abuse issue is particularly sensitive for Ahmadinejad’s government and the clerical leadership because even some conservatives have joined in the criticism of alleged mistreatment of prisoners.

Senior police and judiciary officials have acknowledged that some detainees were abused and called for those responsible to be punished, apparently in an effort to calm public outrage. Also, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei ordered the closure of Kahrizak prison, where at least three prisoners are known to have died.

The issue could also become a weapon in an ongoing split within the conservative camp between Ahmadinejad and his rivals, who have shown increasing tensions since the election.

From the Washington Post, excerpt:

Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has decided to appoint a prosecutor to examine nearly a dozen cases in which CIA interrogators and contractors may have violated anti-torture laws and other statutes when they allegedly threatened terrorism suspects, according to two sources familiar with the move…

Word of Holder’s decision comes on the same day that the Obama administration will issue a 2004 report by the then-CIA Inspector General. Among other things, the IG questioned the effectiveness of harsh interrogation tactics that included simulated drowning and wall slamming. A federal judge in New York forced the administration to release the secret report after a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union.

A separate internal Justice Department ethics report on the professionalism of lawyers who blessed the questioning techniques continues to undergo declassification review and is not likely to be released imminently. The New York Times reported Monday that the ethics report recommended that Holder take another look at several episodes of alleged detainee abuse that previously had been declined for prosecution during the Bush years, bolstering his decision to appoint a prosecutor…

Any criminal investigation into the CIA conduct faces serious hurdles, according to current and former government lawyers, including such challenges as missing evidence, nonexistent or unreliable witnesses, no access to some bodies of detainees who died, and the passage of up to seven years since the questionable activity occurred far from American soil.

During the Bush years, a team of more than a half-dozen career prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia, which is renown for its expertise in probing clandestine operations, reviewed about 20 cases of alleged prisoner abuse after receiving referrals from the military and then-CIA Inspector General John Helgerson. Among the assistant U.S. attorneys involved in the review was Robert Spencer, who successfully prosecuted al-Qaeda operative Zacharias Moussaoui and who later won one of the highest awards the Justice Department bestows.

In only one of the cases did the lawyers recommend seeking a grand jury indictment. A federal appeals court earlier this month affirmed the assault conviction of David A. Passaro, a CIA contractor who wielded a metal flashlight against a detainee at a military base in Afghanistan. Passaro was not charged with murder. Abdul Wali, the detainee he questioned, died shortly after the beating but investigators could not conclusively link his death to the flashlight attack.

brooklynmutt:

A newly declassified CIA report says interrogators threatened to kill the children of a Sept. 11 suspect.

The document, released Monday by the Justice Department, says one interrogator said a colleague had told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that if any other attacks happened in the United States, “We’re going to kill your children.”

Another interrogator allegedly tried to convince a different terror suspect detainee that his mother would be sexually assaulted in front of him - though the interrogator in question denied making such a threat.

via DU

From The Daily Beast, excerpt:

Gay men across Iraq are being rounded up, tortured, and killed by the country’s militias, including the feared Mahdi Army—while the government stands by. The Daily Beast’s Parvez Sharma gets an early look at a report documenting the brutality.

A mostly silent campaign of death has been moving across Iraq since early 2009. A landmark new report, to be released by Human Rights Watch in Beirut on Monday, has been made exclusively available to The Daily Beast’s Parvez Sharma. The 67-page report, which includes chilling testimony from survivors, details the murders of scores of men suspected of homosexual conduct.