Obama to decide today on torture memos

[Kuya]

The Australian press just released some photos that the US government has been trying to block.

More snaps from Abu Ghraib - General - News - smh.com.au

Some photos are a bit graphic.

edit: not sure which have already been released. Checking that now.

edit: false alarm, these are all old.

edit: the false news release originated here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worl...blication.html

[Beckwin]

jesus fuck

even the stupid "well if it's just waterboarding who cares, that isn't real torture" crowd shouldn't be able to muster a defense against this being torture. beatings, infliction of lacerations, and of course healthy doses of homoerotic humiliation...

sounds like rush week at PKE, nothing to see here, move along.

[Kuya]

This is kind of old at this point, don't know why i didn't post it, but, can we PLEASE investigate already?

Former NBC News investigative producer Robert Windrem reports that the vice president’s office suggested waterboarding an Iraqi prisoner who was suspected of knowing about a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam.

At the end of April 2003, not long after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. forces captured an Iraqi who Bush White House officials suspected might provide information of a relationship between al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s regime. Muhammed Khudayr al-Dulaymi was the head of the M-14 section of Mukhabarat, one of Saddam’s secret police organizations. His responsibilities included chemical weapons and contacts with terrorist groups.

“To those who wanted or suspected a relationship, he would have been a guy who would know, so [White House officials] had particular interest,” Charles Duelfer, head of the Iraqi Survey Group and the man in charge of interrogations of Iraqi officials, told me. So much so that the officials, according to Duelfer, inquired how the interrogation was proceeding.

In his new book, Hide and Seek: The Search for Truth in Iraq, and in an interview with The Daily Beast, Duelfer says he heard from “some in Washington at very senior levels (not in the CIA),” who thought Khudayr’s interrogation had been “too gentle” and suggested another route, one that they believed has proven effective elsewhere. “They asked if enhanced measures, such as waterboarding, should be used,” Duelfer writes. “The executive authorities addressing those measures made clear that such techniques could legally be applied only to terrorism cases, and our debriefings were not as yet terrorism-related. The debriefings were just debriefings, even for this creature.”

“Everyone knew there would be more smiles in Washington if WMD stocks were found,” Duelfer said in the interview. “My only obligation was to find the truth. It would be interesting if there was WMD in May 2003, but what was more interesting to me was looking at the entire regime through the slice of WMD.”

But, Duelfer says, Khudayr in fact repeatedly denied knowing the location of WMD or links between Saddam’s regime and al Qaeda and was not subjected to any enhanced interrogation. Duelfer says the idea that he would have known of such links was “ludicrous".

Most people who knew anything about Iraq knew that the chances of WMDs were slim and connections to Al Qaida were preposterous. What's worth nothing here is... asking if a POW (not even someone given some ambiguous category, but an actual POW) could be tortured...?

[Tristam]

Most people who knew anything about Iraq knew that the chances of WMDs were slim and connections to Al Qaida were preposterous. What's worth nothing here is... asking if a POW (not even someone given some ambiguous category, but an actual POW) could be tortured...?

My main problem is engaging in torture in order to "prove" a preconceived judgment. This is a problem that started with assumptions, and we've all seen how the POW definition is meaningless in the age of the war on terrorism. We lack the ability to properly define our enemies. Even so, noone should be tortured.

[Kuya]

More reason as to why investigations must be made, why the photos must be released, and why we have to prosecute. One of the arguments was that "torture" is no longer used under Obama, which was a reason to say that we shouldn't prosecute because it won't be done anymore, it's over. But this is absolutely untrue, these abuses are still rampant, and they have even increased as of late. These reports are all gathered from testimony of detainees, lawyers, doctors, witnesses, and findings from the Spanish court investigating the abuses.

An important piece of investigative journalism by Jeremy Scahill exposing the brutal practices of the ‘Immediate Reaction Force’ - better known to the prisoners as the ‘Extreme Repression Force’ – at Guantanamo. Based on new evidence obtained by the Spanish court which initiated criminal proceedings against John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith several weeks ago, prisoners speak of routine terror which include breaking bones, gouging eyes, squeezing testicles, and “dousing” them with chemicals. The repression is said to have only intensified since Obama got into office, who reinstated the use of ‘military commissions‘ last week, deemed unconstitutional by the US Supreme Court.

details to the ever-emerging portrait of the torture inside and outside Guantánamo. Among them: “blows to [the] testicles;” “detention underground in total darkness for three weeks with deprivation of food and sleep;” being “inoculated … through injection with ‘a disease for dog cysts;’” the smearing of feces on prisoners; and waterboarding. The torture, according to the Spanish investigation, all occurred “under the authority of American military personnel” and was sometimes conducted in the presence of medical professionals.

More significantly, however, the investigation could for the first time place an intense focus on a notorious, but seldom discussed, thug squad deployed by the U.S. military to retaliate with excessive violence to the slightest resistance by prisoners at Guantánamo.

The force is officially known as the the Immediate Reaction Force or Emergency Reaction Force, but inside the walls of Guantánamo, it is known to the prisoners as the Extreme Repression Force. Despite President Barack Obama’s publicized pledge to close the prison camp and end torture — and analysis from human rights lawyers who call these forces’ actions illegal — IRFs remain very much active at Guantánamo.

“The IRF team is intended to be used primarily as a forced-extraction team, specializing in the extraction of a detainee who is combative, resistive, or if the possibility of a weapon is in the cell at the time of the extraction,” according to a declassified copy of the Standard Operating Procedures for Camp Delta at Guantánamo.

When an IRF team is called in, its members are dressed in full riot gear, which some prisoners and their attorneys have compared to “Darth Vader” suits. Each officer is assigned a body part of the prisoner to restrain: head, right arm, left arm, left leg, right leg.

While much of the “torture debate” has emphasized the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” defined by the twisted legal framework of the Office of Legal Council memos, IRF teams in effect operate at Guantánamo as an extrajudicial terror squad that has regularly brutalized prisoners outside of the interrogation room, gang beating them, forcing their heads into toilets, breaking bones, gouging their eyes, squeezing their testicles, urinating on a prisoner’s head, banging their heads on concrete floors and hog-tying them — sometimes leaving prisoners tied in excruciating positions for hours on end.

The IRF teams “were fully approved at the highest levels [of the Bush administration], including the Secretary of Defense and with outside consultation of the Justice Department,” says Scott Horton, one of the leading experts on U.S. Military and Constitutional law. This force “was designed to disabuse the prisoners of any idea that they would be free from physical assault while in U.S. custody,” he says. “They were trained to brutally punish prisoners in a brief period of time, and ridiculous pretexts were taken to justify” the beatings.

Former Guantánamo Army Chaplain James Yee, who witnessed IRFings, described “the seemingly harmless behaviors that brought it on [like] not responding when a guard spoke.” Yee said he believed that during daily cell sweeps, guards would intentionally do invasive searches of the Muslim prisoners’ “private areas” and Korans to “rile the detainees,” saying it “seemed like harassment for the sake of harassment, and the prisoners fought it. Those who did were always IRFed.”

Going to post the specific cases now.

[Kuya]

Perhaps the worst abuses in the Spanish case involve Omar Deghayes, whose torture began long before he reached Guantánamo, and intensified upon his arrival.

A Libyan citizen who had lived in Britain since 1986, in the late 1990s, Deghayes was a law student when he traveled to Afghanistan, “for the simple reason that he is a Muslim and he wanted to see what it was like,” according to his lawyer, Stafford Smith. While there, he met and married an Afghan woman with whom he had a son.

After 9/11, Deghayes was detained in Lahore, Pakistan, for a month, where he allegedly was subjected to “systematic beatings” and “electric shocks done with a tool that looked like a small gun.”

Deghayes was eventually moved to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, where he was beaten and “kept nude, as part of the process of humiliation due to his religion.” U.S. personnel placed Deghayes “inside a closed box with a lock and limited air.” He also described seeing U.S. guards sodomize an African prisoner and alleged guards “forced petrol and benzene up the anuses of the prisoners.”

The IRF team sprayed Mr. Deghayes with mace; they threw him in the air and let him fall on his face … ” according to the Spanish investigation. Deghayes says he also endured a “sexual attack.” In March 2004, after being “sprayed in the eyes with mace,” Deghayes says authorities refused to provide him with medical attention, causing him to permanently lose sight in his right eye. Stafford Smith described the incident:

“They brought their pepper spray and held him down. They held both of his eyes open and sprayed it into his eyes and later took a towel soaked in pepper spray and rubbed it in his eyes.

“Omar could not see from either eye for two weeks, but he gradually got sight back in one eye.

“He’s totally blind in the right eye. I can report that his right eye is all white and milky — he can’t see out of it because he has been blinded by the U.S. in Guantánamo.”

In fact, Stafford Smith says his blindness was caused by a combination of the pepper spray and the fact that an IRF team member pushed his finger into Deghayes’ eye.

ERF-ing Omar — The Feces Incident

On one of the ERF-ing incidents where Omar was abused, the officer in charge himself came into the cell with the feces of another prisoners [sic] and smeared it onto Omar’s face. While some prisoners had thrown feces at the abusive guards, Omar had always emphatically refused to sink to this level. The experience was one of the most disgusting in Omar’s life.

ERF-ing Omar — The Toilet Incident

In April or May 2004, when the Guantánamo administration insisted on taking Omar’s English-language Quran, he objected. The ERF team came into Omar’s cell and put him in shackles. He was not resisting. They then put his head in the toilet, pressed his face into the water. They repeatedly flushed it.

ERF-ing Omar — The Beating

In one ERF-ing incident, Omar was shackled by three American soldiers in their black Darth Vader Star Wars uniforms. The first was going to punch Omar, but before he could, the second kneed Omar in the nose, trying to break it. The third queried this, and the second said, “If his nose is broken, that’s good. We want to break his ******* nose.” The third soldier then took him to hospital.

ERF-ing Omar — The Drowning

The ERF team came into the cell with a water hose under very high pressure. He was totally shackled, and they would hold his head fixed still. They would force water up his nose until he was suffocating and would scream for them to stop. This was done with medical staff present, and they would join in. Omar is particularly affected by the fact that there was one nurse who “had been very beautiful and kind” to him to [sic] took part in the process. This happened three times.

ERF-ing Omar — Tango Block

Omar was out on the Tango block rec yard when 15 ERF soldiers came, with two other soldiers in the towers, armed with guns. They grabbed him (and others) and sprayed him.

They then pulled him up into the air and slammed his face down, on the left side, on the concrete. They had someone from the hospital there, and she just watched. She then came up to him and asked whether he was OK. He was taken off to isolation after that.

A medical examination cited in the Spanish investigation confirmed that Deghayes suffered from blindness of the right eye, fracture of the nasal bone and fracture of the right index finger, as well as post-traumatic stress disorder and “profound” depression.

At the Pentagon, an official paper trail should exist that documents the IRF-ing of Deghayes. What’s more, according to Gen. Miller’s SOP memo, all of the actions of the IRF teams were to be videotaped as well.

“Where are those tapes?” asks CCR President Michael Ratner. In some cases, the answer may well be that they never existed or no longer do. “When an IRFing took place a camera was supposed to be present to capture the IRFing,” said Army Spec. Brandon Neely, who was on one of the first IRF teams at Guantánamo. “Every time I witnessed an IRFing a camera was present, but one of two things would happen: (1) the camera would never be turned on, or (2) the camera would be on, but pointed straight at the ground.”

Neeley recently gave testimony to the University of California, Davis’ Guantánamo Testimonials Project. He also described one IRF-ing where the video of the incident was destroyed.

Posting more excerpts soon.

[Kuya]

Binyam Mohamed, released in February, has also described an IRF assault: “They nearly broke my back. The guy on top was twisting me one way, the guys on my legs the other. They marched me out of the cell to the fingerprint room, still cuffed. I clenched my fists behind me so they couldn’t take [finger]prints, so they tried to take them by force. The guy at my head sticks his fingers up my nose and wrenches my head back, jerking it around by the nostrils. Then he put his fingers in my eyes. It felt as if he was trying to gouge them out. Another guy was punching my ribs, and another was squeezing my testicles. Finally, I couldn’t take it any more. I let them take the prints.”

A report prepared by British human rights lawyer Gareth Peirce, documents the alleged abuse of a Bahraini citizen, Jumah al Dousari by an IRF team...

“The first man is meant to go in with a shield. On this occasion, the man with the shield threw the shield away, took his helmet off, when the door was unlocked ran in and did a knee drop onto Jumah’s back just between his shoulder blades with his full weight. He must have been about 240 pounds in weight. His name was Smith. He was a sergeant E-5. Once he had done that, the others came in and were punching and kicking Jumah. While they were doing that the female officer then came in and was kicking his stomach. Jumah had had an operation and had metal rods in his stomach clamped together in the operation.

“The officer Smith was the MP sergeant who was punching him. He grabbed his head with one hand and with the other hand punched him repeatedly in the face. His nose was broken. He pushed his face, and he smashed it into the concrete floor. All of this should be on video. There was blood everywhere. When they took him out, they hosed the cell down and the water ran red with blood. We all saw it.”

While the U.S. government portrayed a situation where the hunger strikers were being given medical attention, lawyers for some of the men claim that the tubes used to force feed them were “the thickness of a finger” and “were viewed by the detainees as objects of torture.”

According to attorney Julia Tarver, one of her clients, Yousef al-Shehri, had a tube inserted with “one [IRF member] holding his chin while the other held him back by his hair, and a medical staff member forcibly inserted the tube in his nose and down his throat” and into his stomach. “No anesthesia or sedative was provided to alleviate the obvious trauma of the procedure.” Tarver said this method caused al-Shehri and others to vomit “substantial amounts of blood.”

This was painful enough, but al-Shehri, described the removal of the tubes as “unbearable,” causing him to pass out from the pain.

According to Tarver, “Nasal gastric (NG) tubes [were removed] by placing a foot on one end of the tube and yanking the detainee’s head back by his hair, causing the tube to be painfully ejected from the detainee’s nose. Then, in front of the Guantanamo physicians … the guards took NG tubes from one detainee, and with no sanitization whatsoever, reinserted it into the nose of a different detainee. When these tubes were reinserted, the detainees could see the blood and stomach bile from the other detainees remaining on the tubes.” Medical staff, according to Tarver, made no effort to intervene. This was one of many incidents where IRF teams facilitated such force-feeding.

Aside from hunger strikes, other forms of resistance were met with brutal reprisal. Tarek Dergoul, a prisoner interviewed by Human Rights Watch, described how IRF teams beat him because he “often refused to cooperate with cell searches during prayer time. One reason was that they would abuse the Quran. Another was that the guards deliberately felt up my private parts under the guise of searching me.”

Dergoul said, “If I refused a cell search, MPs would call the Extreme Reaction Force, who came in riot gear with plastic shields and pepper spray. The Extreme Reaction Force entered the cell, ran in and pinned me down after spraying me with pepper spray and attacked me. The pepper spray caused me to vomit on several occasions. They poked their fingers in my eyes, banged my head on the floor and kicked and punched me and tied me up like a beast. They often forced my head into the toilet.”

Ironically, perhaps the most well-publicized case of abuse by this force was not inflicted on a Guantanamo prisoner, but on an active-duty U.S. soldier and Gulf War veteran.

In January 2003, Sgt. Sean Baker was ordered to participate in an IRF training drill at Guantánamo where he would play the role of an uncooperative prisoner. Sgt. Baker says he was ordered by his superior to take off his military uniform and put on an orange jumpsuit like those worn by prisoners. He was told to yell out the code word “red” if the situation became unbearable, or he wanted his fellow soldiers to stop.

According to sworn statements, upon entering his cell, IRF members thought they were restraining an actual prisoner. As Sgt. Baker later described:

They grabbed my arms, my legs, twisted me up and, unfortunately, one of the individuals got up on my back from behind and put pressure down on me while I was face down. Then he — the same individual — reached around and began to choke me and press my head down against the steel floor. After several seconds, 20 to 30 seconds, it seemed like an eternity because I couldn’t breathe. When I couldn’t breathe, I began to panic and I gave the code word I was supposed to give to stop the exercise, which was ‘red.’ … That individual slammed my head against the floor and continued to choke me. Somehow I got enough air. I muttered out: ‘I’m a U.S. soldier. I’m a U.S. soldier.’

According to CBS:

Bloodied and disoriented, Baker somehow made it back to his unit, and his first thought was to get hold of the videotape. “I said, ‘Go get the tape,’ ” recalls Baker. ” ‘They’ve got a tape. Go get the tape.’ My squad leader went to get the tape.”

Every extraction drill at Guantanamo was routinely videotaped, and the tape of this drill would show what happened. But Baker says his squad leader came back and said, “There is no tape.”

The New York Times later reported that the military “says it can’t find a videotape that is believed to have been made of the incident.” Baker was soon diagnosed with traumatic brain injury. He began suffering seizures, sometimes 10 to 12 per day.

Less than two weeks later, on Jan. 22, newly inaugurated President Obama issued an executive order requiring the closure of Guantánamo within a year and also ordered a review of the status of the prisoners held there, requiring “humane standards of confinement” in accordance with the Geneva Conventions.

But one month later, the Center for Constitutional Rights released a report titled “Conditions of Confinement at Guantánamo: Still In Violation of the Law,” which found that abuses continued. In fact, one Guantanamo lawyer, Ahmed Ghappour, said that his clients were reporting “a ramping up in abuse” since Obama was elected, including “beatings, the dislocation of limbs, spraying of pepper spray into closed cells, applying pepper spray to toilet paper and over-force feeding detainees who are on hunger strike,” according to Reuters.

I honest can't keep posting more of this, it's simply disgusting. Especially the force feeding without anesthetics, i just couldn't stand that one, and what's more, they even brutalized an american soldier like there was no tomorrow.

How can anyone deny that we need to investigate and prosecute? Furthermore, why is this debate turning into a Pelosi said/CIA said, when what is important is a full investigation of EVERYTHING pertaining to this rampant torture?

[quannum]

i've got 1 word for ya kuya:

ticking time bomb.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

Do you have any sources where someone besides the prisoner can verify the torture lol? Maybe I missed it, but all your sources are "the lawyer of x says his client was tortured because his client told him so." You do know these guys are trained to claim torture right?

[Rhinox]

how about Tom Ridge would you believe him?

Here I'll even post a Fox news link for you.

FOXNews.com - AP: Former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge Says Waterboarding is Torture - Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum

Michael McConnell the U.S. Intelligence Chief under Bush.

FOXNews.com - U.S. Intelligence Chief Says He Considers Waterboarding Torture - Politics | Republican Party | Democratic Party | Political Spectrum

Richard Armitage.

Ex-Bush official says waterboarding is torture

[Kuya]

Do you have any sources where someone besides the prisoner can verify the torture lol? Maybe I missed it, but all your sources are "the lawyer of x says his client was tortured because his client told him so." You do know these guys are trained to claim torture right?

What specific parts of all of that do you think are lies? Point them out, examine them, determine how they are lies, and explain what mechanism you're using to determine whether they are false stories or not. If not, i have no reason to listen to rhetoric.

[Kiro]

Kuya the College Professor.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

What specific parts of all of that do you think are lies? Point them out, examine them, determine how they are lies, and explain what mechanism you're using to determine whether they are false stories or not. If not, i have no reason to listen to rhetoric.

Explain what makes you think they are true. Were supposed to just believe people that are trained to lie about torture when they claim they're being tortured?

[Shiroikage]

As much as I hate discussing politics, how can you believe it's not troubling to automatically assume that a prisoner who claims to be tortured was not tortured? Can you not see the sort of situations this could possibly create?

You've got to be trolling if you're saying that with your sig/'tar combo.

[Kuya]

Explain what makes you think they are true. Were supposed to just believe people that are trained to lie about torture when they claim they're being tortured?

Either point out a specific part of what i posted and explain why that is a lie, or you can go elsewhere. You questioned it first, so explain yourself or get out.

I don't have time to deal with blanket statements.

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

As much as I hate discussing politics, how can you believe it's not troubling to automatically assume that a prisoner who claims to be tortured was not tortured? Can you not see the sort of situations this could possibly create?

You've got to be trolling if you're saying that with your sig/'tar combo.

I'm not assuming what they say is false. I'm really not assuming anything. I'm just questioning how you can automatically take a prisoners word for it who is trained to lie about torture.

And Kuya, I'm not saying they're lies, I'm asking you to explain to me why you believe it to be true. If I said "Obama sucks" you wouldn't take my word for it. So why do you take these terrorists word for it? And to play along, I think they're lies because they're saying what they're trained to say.

[Elvis]

What are you skeptical about Swamp? We have the Taguba report (among others) and all those pictures. Testimonies from US soldiers. Etc.

How are people trained to lie about torture? Like lying specifically about torture... You'd think that a lie is a lie. If they were not tortured and are lying about it, why do they need "training" - it's obviously not specific to torture since they did not experience it (under your premise).

[SwampdonkeyPLD]

What are you skeptical about Swamp? We have the Taguba report (among others) and all those pictures. Testimonies from US soldiers. Etc.

How are people trained to lie about torture? Like lying specifically about torture... You'd think that a lie is a lie. If they were not tortured and are lying about it, why do they need "training" - it's obviously not specific to torture since they did not experience it (under your premise).

I don't mean literal training like training for a marathon, just that they are told if they are ever captured to claim they were tortured.

And I was just skeptical about everything that Kuya posted there. I don't doubt we tortured people, but everything he just posted comes from people who are told to lie about being tortured.

[Demosthenes11]

you need more credible evidence than a prisoner's testimony to prosecute - especially in high profile cases of this magnitude

There are no assumptions in the court of law, whether it be assuming true or false

[Kuya]

I'm not assuming what they say is false. I'm really not assuming anything. I'm just questioning how you can automatically take a prisoners word for it who is trained to lie about torture.

And Kuya, I'm not saying they're lies, I'm asking you to explain to me why you believe it to be true. If I said "Obama sucks" you wouldn't take my word for it. So why do you take these terrorists word for it? And to play along, I think they're lies because they're saying what they're trained to say.

Alright, you already should have read this before even questioning anything since the answers are already in the link i posted. I'll take this step by step so pay attention.

First, as to your claim that they're trained to lie, well they're not. Why aren't they trained to lie? Because they're not terrorist. 5 of the testimonies obtained were from the 5 Spanish citizens who were acquitted of terrorism charges by the Spanish Supreme Court. Aside from the Spanish citizens, there is the British citizen Binyam Mohamed (the one who got his genitals sliced) who you might know since he's involved in a nasty little problem where the US has threatened the UK not to reveal information of Binyam's torture from official memos or else the US would not share intelligence info with the UK.

Next, Omar Deghayes's testimony was confirmed by medical reports which confirmed his broken nose and his blindness in the right eye as per his story on how he was brutalized by the ERF. The ERF's existence has already been confirmed by the government, as well as by the US soldier Sean Baker assault by the ERF. Furthermore, it was alleged that all ERF activities were recorded, however, as you might have read, Army Spec. Brandon Neely confirmed that everytime he witnessed an ERF attack, the cameras were always either off or pointing at the ground. Furthermore, during Baker's beating it also turned out it wasn't recorded even though they told him it would be. This brings into question why they would say that they record the ERF's activity, while in reality, this is not true. In other words, what are they hiding?

So to summarize, we have confirmation from civilians, not terrorists, who are not trained to lie about this, we have confirmation from an ex ERF member Neely, we have confirmation of the ERF's activity from the brutalized US soldier Baker, and we have had medical investigations confirm the stories from the brutalized civilians. And most of this information was obtained, not from some random source somewhere, but the Spanish Supreme Court's investigation into the rampant brutalizing and torture that is currently allowed to run amok in the US extra judicial detention systems.