The People's Record

NYT publishes op-ed from Gitmo prisoner: Gitmo is killing me
April 16, 2013

One man here weighs just 77 pounds. Another, 98. Last thing I knew, I weighed 132, but that was a month ago.

I’ve been on a hunger strike since Feb. 10 and have lost well over 30 pounds. I will not eat until they restore my dignity.

I’ve been detained at Guantánamo for 11 years and three months. I have never been charged with any crime. I have never received a trial.

I could have been home years ago — no one seriously thinks I am a threat — but still I am here. Years ago the military said I was a “guard” for Osama bin Laden, but this was nonsense, like something out of the American movies I used to watch. They don’t even seem to believe it anymore. But they don’t seem to care how long I sit here, either.

When I was at home in Yemen, in 2000, a childhood friend told me that in Afghanistan I could do better than the $50 a month I earned in a factory, and support my family. I’d never really traveled, and knew nothing about Afghanistan, but I gave it a try.

I was wrong to trust him. There was no work. I wanted to leave, but had no money to fly home. After the American invasion in 2001, I fled to Pakistan like everyone else. The Pakistanis arrested me when I asked to see someone from the Yemeni Embassy. I was then sent to Kandahar, and put on the first plane to Gitmo.

Last month, on March 15, I was sick in the prison hospital and refused to be fed. A team from the E.R.F. (Extreme Reaction Force), a squad of eight military police officers in riot gear, burst in. They tied my hands and feet to the bed. They forcibly inserted an IV into my hand. I spent 26 hours in this state, tied to the bed. During this time I was not permitted to go to the toilet. They inserted a catheter, which was painful, degrading and unnecessary. I was not even permitted to pray.

I will never forget the first time they passed the feeding tube up my nose. I can’t describe how painful it is to be force-fed this way. As it was thrust in, it made me feel like throwing up. I wanted to vomit, but I couldn’t. There was agony in my chest, throat and stomach. I had never experienced such pain before. I would not wish this cruel punishment upon anyone.

I am still being force-fed. Two times a day they tie me to a chair in my cell. My arms, legs and head are strapped down. I never know when they will come. Sometimes they come during the night, as late as 11 p.m., when I’m sleeping.

There are so many of us on hunger strike now that there aren’t enough qualified medical staff members to carry out the force-feedings; nothing is happening at regular intervals. They are feeding people around the clock just to keep up.

During one force-feeding the nurse pushed the tube about 18 inches into my stomach, hurting me more than usual, because she was doing things so hastily. I called the interpreter to ask the doctor if the procedure was being done correctly or not.

It was so painful that I begged them to stop feeding me. The nurse refused to stop feeding me. As they were finishing, some of the “food” spilled on my clothes. I asked them to change my clothes, but the guard refused to allow me to hold on to this last shred of my dignity.

When they come to force me into the chair, if I refuse to be tied up, they call the E.R.F. team. So I have a choice. Either I can exercise my right to protest my detention, and be beaten up, or I can submit to painful force-feeding.

The only reason I am still here is that President Obama refuses to send any detainees back to Yemen. This makes no sense. I am a human being, not a passport, and I deserve to be treated like one.

I do not want to die here, but until President Obama and Yemen’s president do something, that is what I risk every day.

Where is my government? I will submit to any “security measures” they want in order to go home, even though they are totally unnecessary.

I will agree to whatever it takes in order to be free. I am now 35. All I want is to see my family again and to start a family of my own.

The situation is desperate now. All of the detainees here are suffering deeply. At least 40 people here are on a hunger strike. People are fainting with exhaustion every day. I have vomited blood.

And there is no end in sight to our imprisonment. Denying ourselves food and risking death every day is the choice we have made.

I just hope that because of the pain we are suffering, the eyes of the world will once again look to Guantánamo before it is too late.

Samir Naji al Hasan Moqbel, a prisoner at Guantánamo Bay since 2002, told this story, through an Arabic interpreter, to his lawyers at the legal charity Reprieve in an unclassified telephone call.

Source

Guantanamo detainees’ hunger strike enters third month
April 13, 2013

A hunger strike by detainees at the U.S. naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, has entered its third month. The Department of Defense said 43 detainees were striking, and 11 were being fed forcibly through a tube inserted through the nose to the stomach.

Lawyers for the detainees say the number of hunger strikers is much higher.

The Department of Defense classifies hunger strikers as those, who have missed nine consecutive meals, and says the forced-feedings are not part of a policy specific to Guantanamo detainees, but are part of the Federal Bureau of Prisons guidelines.

Cori Crider, the lawyer who represents, Samir Moqbel, a Yemeni detainee, who has joined the hunger strike, says she recently talked to her client.

Crider described how Moqbel was forcibly fed.

“They chained his arms to the bed, chained his legs to the bed. He was left like that, he said, for 26 hours. He was not allowed to use the restroom; they just put a catheter in. They didn’t allow him to pray and while he was chained to the bed they forcibly fed him.”

While the strike began as a protest against the way the guards searched copies of the Quran inside the detainees’ cells, it has transformed into a bigger protest, the lawyer adds.

“Now it’s about eleven years of indefinite detention, two administrations, one of which claimed it was going to close this prison within a year. I think these people are just trying to remind the world, ‘hey we’re still here, half of us are cleared. Please, please demand that the United States do something about this.’”

Crider says her client discussed an attempted suicide by another one of the detainees, howqever, U.S. authorities denied the incident.

U.S. Army Captain Jason Wright, who represents Obaydallah, an Afghan detainee, who is also a hunger striker, visited his client recently and says Obaydallah has lost over 40 pounds.

“Obaydallah described the detention camp as a village decimated by an attack. The detainees are weak, the don’t move, they have no energy and everyone has the face of death and despair.”

Wright says over 50 detainees have been moved from camp six, a communal living facility, to camp five, where there are solitary cells usually reserved for detainees that are deemed to be troublemakers.

Full article

On April 5, 2010, WikiLeaks released the classified Collateral Murder video to the public.  

The video shows an Apache helicopter indiscriminately firing on a dozen people, including two Reuters staff, in Baghdad. Later in the footage, rescuers, including two children, were also targeted. 

The footage was leaked to WikiLeaks by Pfc. B. Manning, who has been in prison for 1046 days. Manning’s detention conditions have been found to be “cruel, inhuman & degrading” by UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan E. Mendez. 

“The most alarming aspect of the video to me was the seemingly delightful bloodlust the aerial weapons team happened to have.” - Manning

Watch the full Collateral Murder video here.

Pentagon requests $49 million to build new GITMO prison
March 22, 2013

The US Southern Command (Southcom) has requested $49 million to build a new prison building at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba “for special detainees” as well as carry out other “necessary” renovations, US media reveal.

The proposed facility is an apparent replacement for Camp 7, which was constructed to hold 14 “high-value” detainees – including the self-described 9/11 attack architect Khalid Shaikh Mohammed –who had been in CIA custody, but were handed over to the military in 2006.

The proposed prison comes on top of funds previously requested to upgrade the camp’s facilities, including a new dining hall, barracks for prison guards, a hospital, a “legal meeting complex” and a “communications network facility” to store data, the New York Times reports.

Many of the facilities were in a state of disrepair as they were never intended to be used on a permanent basis, a Southcom spokesman told the Huffington Post.

“Most of the buildings and infrastructure were built for a short-term mission,” said Lt. Cmdr. Ron Flanders. “We got down there in 2002, but never in a million years would we still have this in 2013 with no end in sight.”

The additional request will balloon the overall cost to $195.7 million, significantly higher than the estimated $150-170 million that Southcom commander General John Kelly gave while providing congressional testimony on Wednesday, NYT reports.

The special detention facility was also not included among the list of proposed constructions released by Southcom on Wednesday.

All of the projects have already been approved by Kelly, though they are pending approval by the Pentagon, which is headed the new Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel.

With an operational budget of $177 million for 2013, Guantanamo is the United States most expensive prison, with US taxpayers already paying more than $1 million dollars for each of the camp’s 166 detainees per annum.

The proposed upgrades come in the midst of a hunger strike among Guantanamo detainees which has now entered its 45th day.

On Wednesday, Kelly told a congressional committee that two dozen Guantanamo prisoners were on “hunger strike light” following allegations the Koran had been mishandled, claims which the general dismissed as “nonsense.”“They had great optimism that Guantanamo would be closed. They were devastated apparently … when the president backed off, at least [that’s] their perception, of closing the facility,” John Kelly told the House Armed Services Committee in Washington.

The officially-acknowledged number of Gitmo detainees on hunger strike reached 26 people on Friday, with eight receiving enteral feeds, Guantanamo Bay spokesman Capt. Robert Durand told RT.

Former Guantanamo prison official Ret. Col. Morris Davis told RT that many of the hunger strikers had become disillusioned with Obama’s promise of hope and change.

“But here you have a majority of the men at Guantanamo — 86 of the 106 who have been cleared for transfer — who have been in confinement now for more than a decade in some cases. So to them, with the hunger strike, they’re kind of out of sight out of mind and the only way to potentially call attention to it is to do something drastic like a hunger strike. So the numbers - DoD has said the numbers have gone from seven to 14 to 21, to I believe 25 is the last official number. But if you talk to some of the attorneys that have been down there, they say that’s a low-ball figure, that it’s probably three or four times that.”President Barack Obama’s first act as president was to sign an executive order to close the detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

“I have said repeatedly that I intend to close Guantanamo, and I will follow through on that,” Obama told CBS’ Steve Kroft in November 2008.

Source

Revealed by Pfc. B. Manning & WikiLeaks: The Pentagon’s link to Iraqi torture centers
March 7, 2013

The Pentagon sent a US veteran of the “dirty wars” in Central America to oversee sectarian police commando units in Iraq that set up secret detention and torture centres to get information from insurgents. These units conducted some of the worst acts of torture during the US occupation and accelerated the country’s descent into full-scale civil war.

Colonel James Steele was a 58-year-old retired special forces veteran when he was nominated by Donald Rumsfeld to help organise the paramilitaries in an attempt to quell a Sunni insurgency, an investigation by the Guardian and BBC Arabic shows.

After the Pentagon lifted a ban on Shia militias joining the security forces, the special police commando (SPC) membership was increasingly drawn from violent Shia groups such as the Badr brigades.

A second special adviser, retired Colonel James H Coffman, worked alongside Steele in detention centres that were set up with millions of dollars of US funding.

Coffman reported directly to General David Petraeus, sent to Iraq in June 2004 to organise and train the new Iraqi security forces. Steele, who was in Iraq from 2003 to 2005, and returned to the country in 2006, reported directly to Rumsfeld.

The allegations, made by US and Iraqi witnesses in the Guardian/BBC documentary, implicate US advisers for the first time in the human rights abuses committed by the commandos. It is also the first time that Petraeus – who last November was forced to resign as director of the CIA after a sex scandal – has been linked through an adviser to this abuse.

Coffman reported to Petraeus and described himself in an interview with the US military newspaper Stars and Stripes as Petraeus’s “eyes and ears out on the ground” in Iraq.

“They worked hand in hand,” said General Muntadher al-Samari, who worked with Steele and Coffman for a year while the commandos were being set up. “I never saw them apart in the 40 or 50 times I saw them inside the detention centres. They knew everything that was going on there … the torture, the most horrible kinds of torture.”

Additional Guardian reporting has confirmed more details of how the interrogation system worked. “Every single detention centre would have its own interrogation committee,” claimed Samari, talking for the first time in detail about the US role in the interrogation units.

“Each one was made up of an intelligence officer and eight interrogators. This committee will use all means of torture to make the detainee confess like using electricity or hanging him upside down, pulling out their nails, and beating them on sensitive parts.”

There is no evidence that Steele or Coffman tortured prisoners themselves, only that they were sometimes present in the detention centres where torture took place and were involved in the processing of thousands of detainees.

The Guardian/BBC Arabic investigation was sparked by the release of classified US military logs on WikiLeaks that detailed hundreds of incidents where US soldiers came across tortured detainees in a network of detention centres run by the police commandos across Iraq. Private B. Manning, 25, is facing a prison sentence of up to 20 years after they pleaded guilty to leaking the documents.

Samari claimed that torture was routine in the SPC-controlled detention centres. “I remember a 14-year-old who was tied to one of the library’s columns. And he was tied up, with his legs above his head. Tied up. His whole body was blue because of the impact of the cables with which he had been beaten.”

Gilles Peress, a photographer, came across Steele when he was on assignment for the New York Times, visiting one of the commando centres in the same library, in Samarra. “We were in a room in the library interviewing Steele and I’m looking around I see blood everywhere.”

The reporter Peter Maass was also there, working on the story with Peress. “And while this interview was going on with a Saudi jihadi with Jim Steele also in the room, there were these terrible screams, somebody shouting: ‘Allah, Allah, Allah!’ But it wasn’t kind of religious ecstasy or something like that, these were screams of pain and terror.”

The pattern in Iraq provides an eerie parallel to the well-documented human rights abuses committed by US-advised and funded paramilitary squads in Central America in the 1980s. Steele was head of a US team of special military advisers that trained units of El Salvador’s security forces in counterinsurgency. Petraeus visited El Salvador in 1986 while Steele was there and became a major advocate of counterinsurgency methods.

Steele has not responded to any questions from the Guardian and BBC Arabic about his role in El Salvador or Iraq. He has in the past denied any involvement in torture and said publicly he is “opposed to human rights abuses.” Coffman declined to comment.

An official speaking for Petraeus said: “During the course of his years in Iraq, General Petraeus did learn of allegations of Iraqi forces torturing detainees. In each incident, he shared information immediately with the US military chain of command, the US ambassador in Baghdad … and the relevant Iraqi leaders.”

The Guardian has learned that the SPC units’ involvement with torture entered the popular consciousness in Iraq when some of their victims were paraded in front of a TV audience on a programme called “Terrorism In The Hands of Justice.”

SPC detention centres bought video cameras, funded by the US military, which they used to film detainees for the show. When the show began to outrage the Iraqi public, Samari remembers being in the home of General Adnan Thabit – head of the special commandos – when a call came from Petraeus’s office demanding that they stop showing tortured men on TV.

“General Petraeus’s special translator, Sadi Othman, rang up to pass on a message from General Petraeus telling us not to show the prisoners on TV after they had been tortured,” said Samari. “Then 20 minutes later we got a call from the Iraqi ministry of interior telling us the same thing, that General Petraeus didn’t want the torture victims shown on TV.”

Othman, who now lives in New York, confirmed that he made the phone call on behalf of Petraeus to the head of the SPC to ask him to stop showing the tortured prisoners. “But General Petraeus does not agree with torture,” he added. “To suggest he does support torture is horseshit.”

Thabit is dismissive of the idea that the Americans he dealt with were unaware of what the commandos were doing. “Until I left, the Americans knew about everything I did; they knew what was going on in the interrogations and they knew the detainees. Even some of the intelligence about the detainees came to us from them – they are lying.”

Just before Petraeus and Steele left Iraq in September 2005, Jabr al-Solagh was appointed as the new minister of the interior. Under Solagh, who was closely associated with the violent Badr Brigades militia, allegations of torture and brutality by the commandos soared. It was also widely believed that the units had evolved into death squads.

The Guardian has learned that high-ranking Iraqis who worked with the US after the invasion warned Petraeus of the consequences of appointing Solagh but their pleas were ignored.

The long-term impact of funding and arming this paramilitary force was to unleash a deadly sectarian militia that terrorised the Sunni community and helped germinate a civil war that claimed tens of thousands of lives. At the height of that sectarian conflict, 3,000 bodies a month were strewn on the streets of Iraq.

Source

After their arrest, Manning was then tortured in a military prison for revealing information about torture. The torturers themselves have walked away scot-free & unharmed even to this day.

The stories about human rights violations at the hands of the US are virtually endless. The people of the US government are the terrorists. 

Man left in solitary confinement for 2 years gets $15.5 million in one of the largest federal civil rights awards in history
March 6, 2013

A man who spent 22 long months in solitary confinement in a New Mexico jail, neglected to the point where he was forced to pull out his own tooth because he said he wasn’t allowed to see a dentist, will receive $15.5 million for the ordeal.

The settlement with Dona Ana County, N.M., falls short of the $22 million that Stephen Slevin, 59, and his attorney had asked for, but is still one of the largest prisoner civil rights payouts in U.S. history.

“His mental health has been severely compromised from the time he was in that facility. That continues to be the same. No amount of money will bring back what they took away from him,” Matt Coyte, Slevin’s Albuquerque-based attorney, said on Wednesday. “But it’s nice to be able to get him some money so he can improve where he is in life and move on.”

Slevin’s story of inhumane treatment in the Dona Ana County Jail, where he was incarcerated from 2005 to 2007 — which he said included his toenails growing so long that they curled around his foot, and fungus festering on his skin because he was deprived of showers — first received publicity last January, when he was awarded the $22 million.

Dona Ana County had been appealing the verdict ever since, refusing to pay Slevin.

But the legal battle ended Tuesday with the $15.5 million settlement, a number decided on in court mediation, according to Jess Williams, Dona Ana County’s public information director.

An initial payment of $6 million is expected to be wired to Slevin by the end of this week; he will receive the rest in installments in the following days.

For Slevin — who has lung cancer and has beaten doctors’ odds for how long he would survive — the case was not about how much money he could make, his attorney said, but about getting recognition of how poorly he was treated and the scars he still has.

“He’s had lots of difficulties over the years. I don’t think he will stop having difficulties,” Coyte said. “The courage he had in the trial was magnificent.”

Slevin’s mistreatment by Dona Ana County started the moment he was arrested back in August of 2005, his attorney told NBC News.

“He was driving through New Mexico and arrested for a DWI, and he allegedly was in a stolen vehicle. Well, it was a car he had borrowed from a friend; a friend had given him a car to drive across the country,” Coyte said in an interview last January.

Slevin was depressed at the time, Coyte explained, and wanted to get out of New Mexico. Instead, he found himself in jail.

“When he gets put in the jail, they think he’s suicidal, and they put him in a padded cell for three days, but never give him any treatment.”

Nor did they give him a trial, Coyte said. Slevin said he never saw a judge during his time in confinement.

After three days in the padded cell, jail guards transferred Slevin into solitary confinement with no explanation. 

“Their policy is to then just put them in solitary” if they appear to have mental health issues, Coyte told NBC News. 

While in solitary confinement, a prisoner is entitled to one hour per day out of the cell, but often times, Slevin wasn’t even granted that, Coyte said. 

“Your insanity builds. Some people holler or throw feces out their cell doors,” he said. “Others rock back and forth under a blanket for a year or more, which is what my client did.”

By the time Slevin got out of jail, his hair was shaggy and overgrown, his beard long, and his face pale and sunken, a drastic contrast from the clean-shaven booking photo taken of him when he was arrested two years prior.

“Without that picture, we couldn’t have gotten where we were,” Coyte said of the lawsuit.

Coyte would not reveal where Slevin is living now for privacy reasons, only saying that he was not in New Mexico. He said he receives support from family and is “doing well” and “feels optimistic” about his treatment for cancer, which is unrelated to his time in jail and was not a factor in his trial.

Williams, the Dona Ana County public information officer, said no jail personnel have been fired over Slevin’s treatment. However, he said, the jail has been working to improve the care it provides for mentally ill inmates.

“We now have dedicated wings of the building, one for males, one for females, that are totally dedicated for closely supervised mental health provisions and care,” he said. “We’ve greatly expanded our medical area and we have contracted out at great expense for both medical and mental health services within the facility.”

Source

Pfc. B. Manning pleads guilty to misusing classified data; pleads not guilty to aiding the enemy under the Espionage Act
February 28, 2013

The U.S. Army private accused of providing diplomatic cables and other secret documents to the WikiLeaks website pleaded guilty on Thursday to misusing classified material, but denied the most serious charge in the case, aiding the enemy.

Private First Class B. Manning, 25, entered the pleas prior to the court martial, which is set to begin on June 3, in a case that centers on the biggest leak of government secrets in U.S. history.

“I believe that if the general public … had access to the information … this could spark a domestic debate as to the role of the military and foreign policy in general,” Manning, dressed in full military uniform, testified calmly.

Reading from a 35-page statement as they remained seated next to their lawyers, the short, slight private described their feelings after they submitted the secret information to WikiLeaks.

“I felt I accomplished something that would allow me to have a clear conscience,” said Manning, who spoke under oath for more than an hour.

At the hearing, Manning pleaded not guilty to the most serious charge, aiding the enemy, through their attorney. Manning, who has been jailed at Quantico Marine Base in Virginia for more than 1,000 days (Note: the legal limit is 120 days), could face life imprisonment if convicted of that charge.

Manning pleaded guilty to a series of 10 lesser charges that they misused classified information at the hearing before military judge Colonel Denise Lind. They face a maximum of 20 years in prison for those charges.

Under a ruling last month by Lind, Manning would have any sentence reduced by 112 days to compensate for the markedly harsh treatment they received during their confinement. While at Quantico, Manning was placed in solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day with guards checking on them every few minutes. (Plus psychologically tortured, which is rarely mentioned)

Manning admitted to unauthorized possession and willful communication of information from military databases, including the Combined Information Data Network Exchange Iraq and Combined Information Data Network Exchange Afghanistan.

They also admitted to misuse of documents from the U.S. Southern Command pertaining to Guantanamo Bay, a memo from an unnamed intelligence agency, and records from a military operation in Farah province in Afghanistan.

Manning, an Army intelligence officer, was arrested in May 2010 while serving in Iraq and charged with downloading thousands of intelligence documents, diplomatic cables and combat videos and forwarding them to WikiLeaks.

WikiLeaks began exposing the U.S. government secrets in the same year, stunning diplomats around the world and outraging U.S. officials who said damage to national security from the leaks endangered U.S. lives.

Source

Manning faces life in a military prison for exposing war crimes while those who actually commited the war crimes have not been arrested, let alone charged.

FREE MANNING!

How Israel gets away with torturing Palestinians to death
February 26, 2013

Six days after Arafat Jaradat was arrested by the Israeli army and the Shin Bet, he was dead. Between the date of his arrest - February 18 - and the day of his death - February 23 - his lawyer Kamil Sabbagh met with Arafat only once: in front of a military judge at the Shin Bet’s Kishon interrogation facility.

Sabbagh reported that when he saw Jaradat, the man was terrified. Arafat told his lawyer that he was in acute pain from being beaten and forced to sit in stress positions with his hands bound behind his back.

When it announced his death, Israeli Prison Service claimed Arafat - who leaves a pregnant widow and two children - died from cardiac arrest. However, the subsequent autopsy found no blood clot in his heart. In fact, the autopsy concluded that Arafat, who turned 30 this year, was in fine cardiovascular health.

What the final autopsy did find, however, was that Jaradat had been pummelled by repeated blows to his chest and body and had sustained a total of six broken bones in his spine, arms and legs; his lips lacerated; his face badly bruised.

The ordeal that Arafat suffered before he died at the hands of Israel’s Shin Bet is common to many Palestinians that pass through Israel’s prisons. According to the prisoners’ rights organisation Addameer, since 1967, a total of 72 Palestinians have been killed as a result of torture and 53 due to medical neglect. Less than a month before Jaradat was killed, Ashraf Abu Dhra died while in Israeli custody in a case that Addameer argues was a direct result of medical neglect.

The legal impunity of the Shin Bet, commonly referred to as the GSS, and its torture techniques has been well established. Between 2001 and 2011, 700 Palestinians lodged complaints with the State Attorney’s Office but not a single one has been criminally investigated.

Writing in Adalah’s 2012 publication, On Torture [PDF], Bana Shoughry-Badarne, an attorney and the Legal Director of the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel, wrote, “The GSS’s impunity is absolute.”

Israel’s High Court has been extravagantly helpful in securing the Shin Bet with its imperviousness to accountability to international law, and thus enabling widespread and lethal torture.

In August of 2012, Israel’s High Court rejected petitions submitted by Israeli human rights organisations Adalah, the Association for Civil Rights in Israel and PCATI to demand that Israeli attorney general, Yehuda Weinstein, carry out criminal investigations into each allegation of torture by the Shin Bet.

And in the first week of February, two weeks before Arafat was killed, the High Court of Justice threw out Adalah’s petition that demanded the GSS videotape and audio record all of its interrogations in order to comply with requirements of the United Nations Convention Against Torture (CAT) to which Israel is a signatory.

In May 2009, UNCAT condemned [PDF] Israel for exempting the Shin Bet’s interrogations from audio and video recording, noting that such oversight is an essential preventative measure to curtail torture. Yet despite this admonition, in 2012 the Knesset extended the exemption for another three years.

Rationalising its failure to comply with this most basic requirement of recording interrogations, the State maintains that it is in the interests of “national security” that its interrogation techniques not be made public.

Arafat was killed under torture. Torture is routine. But the following is not routine: upon the announcement of his death, thousands of Palestinians, already unified in solidarity with the arduous struggle waged by Palestinian hunger striking prisoners, responded in force. At least 3,000 prisoners refused their meals; thousands poured into the streets of Gaza and impassioned demonstrations erupted across the West Bank. While the State of Israel continues to deploy its deadly arsenal of weapons to repress Palestinians, the banality of the evil of this regime is, as it will always be, eclipsed by the mighty Palestinian will for self-determination.

Source

Pfc. B. Manning has now spent more than 1,000 days imprisoned without trial. The legal limit for military court is 120 days. 

Manning allegedly released classified cables to Wikileaks, including the Collateral Murder video, the Afghan War logs, the Iraq War logs, State Department cables & Guantanamo Bay files. 

The soldier has been imprisoned in conditions which Juan Mendez, a UN Special Rapporteur on torture deemed “cruel, inhumane & degrading”. Manning faces 22 charges. The most significant charge is that of “aiding the enemy.” If convicted of “aiding the enemy,” they would serve life in prison without parole. 

The leaks have revealed indiscriminate murder of civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, the murder of two Reuters journalists among a group of unarmed civilians in Baghdad, prisoner abuse & torture in Iraq, US officials covering up child abuse by private contractors, such as DynCorp, in Afghanistan, hundreds of innocent people are being held at Guantanamo, an official account of civilian deaths in Iraq & Afghanistan that the Obama administration previously maintained didn’t exist (between 2004 and 2009, the U.S. government counted a total of 109,000 deaths in Iraq, with 66,081 classified as non-combatants), the inner-workings of Obama’s then-secret drone campaign in Yemen among other incidents of corruption & crimes against humanity.

Manning has become the face of Obama’s war on whistleblowers, an attempt to shield the government’s war crimes & human rights violations.

Inside the Bush admin’s lawless global torture regime & how Obama remains complicit
February 22, 2013

You may not have heard of Mohammed al-Asad, but the torture he suffered was carried out in your name. And his story is one of 136 such ordeals that were perpetrated by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Those stories are told in a comprehensive report issued by the Open Society Foundations (OSF) this month. Titled “ Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition,” the report is the fullest accounting yet of the Bush administration’s global torture ring. The document aims to fully fill in the gaps of what people know about the Bush administration’s torture program, which enlisted the help of 54 countries around the world.

Al-Asad is a Yemeni national who was detained in Tanzania in 2003 by security forces in that country. He was then shipped off to Djibouti where he was held incommunicado before being transferred to a U.S. “rendition team” which consisted of five people, all of whom wore black with their faces covered.

Then al-Asad was shipped off to a third country, Afghanistan, where he was held in isolation, subject to loud music, faced harsh light 24 hours a day and had his diet manipulated. Finally, al-Asad, by this time damaged by intense CIA-led torture, was handed off to Yemen, his home country and a repressive ally of the U.S., where he was imprisoned for using forged travel documents. He was finally released in 2006, without ever being charged with terrorism—the ostensible reason the CIA picked up him up and tortured him in the first place. 

Mohammed al-Asad’s ordeal was by no means unique. He was caught up in the dragnet of the CIA’s global program of “extraordinary rendition,” which liberally used torture on alleged terrorist suspects, though some were undoubtedly innocent. In total, 136 people were subject to either the CIA’s “black sites” or “extraordinary rendition” operations.

Authored by Amrit Singh, senior legal officer for national security and counterterrorism at the Open Society Foundations, the report fully exposes the shocking breadth of the CIA’s lawlessness in the age of the war on terror. 

“There was a need for a comprehensive public record on the scale and scope of the CIA’s secret detention and extraordinary rendition operations, both in terms of the victims of these operations and the associated human rights abuses, as well as the governments that were complicit,” Singh told AlterNet . 

The OSF publication gives names to the people tortured by the CIA, exposes the governments around the globe complicit in America’s torture ring, calls for investigations and accountability for the lawless programs, and makes clear that “extraordinary renditions” were not outlawed by the Obama administration and that the U.S. has a responsibility under the law to investigate and prosecute those behind the global torture program right now. It is at once a call for action directed at the Obama administration and an important historical document that lays bare the utter depravity of the Bush administration’s practices.

The Obama administration’s mantra on the torture carried out under the Bush administration has been to “look forward,” and not backward. This has resulted in grotesque abuses carried out by the CIA being swept under the rug, with no criminal prosecutions forthcoming. And while Obama did sign a much-heralded executive order to ban torture, the order also was “specifically crafted to preserve the CIA’s authority to detain terrorist suspects for short periods prior to ‘rendering’ them to another country for interrogation or trial,” writes Singh.

“Globalizing Torture” focuses on two different yet interlocking aspects of the CIA’s global torture program, which the Bush administration put into overdrive following the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

“Extraordinary rendition” is defined as the “transfer—without legal process—of a detainee to the custody of a foreign government for purposes of detention and interrogation,” as the report states. The “black sites” were “a secret detention program under which suspected terrorists were held in CIA prisons,” and “where they were subjected to interrogation methods that involved torture and other abuses.”

Full article

Glenn Greenwald wrote about this kind of retroactive immunity presidents grant to one another in order to save their own ass from future investigations on illegal & unethical practices. Obama once campaigned to hold the Bush administration accountable for the horrific torture methods at Guantanamo & other prisons, but secret detentions have continued under the current administration. 

In fact, 20 prisoners who were held by the CIA are still missing.

John Owen Brennan is chief counterterrorism advisor to U.S. President Barack Obama; officially his title is Deputy National Security Advisor for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, and Assistant to the President. He supports drones and will not admit that water-boarding is torture. He was nominated to be the new CIA director and has supported water-boarding and drone-terror in his nomination hearing.

Lyrics to Torture Memos above, a song written & sung by Jonathan Mann in 2009 - lyrics were taken directly from official memos on torture. It was the 109th song in his song-a-day project, which is still on-going: 

the detainee is lying on a gurney
that’s inclined at an angle: 10 to 15 degrees
a cloth is placed over the detainee’s face
cold water is poured on the cloth

the wet cloth creates
a barrier through which
it is difficult or in some cases not possible
for the detainee to breathe

if the detainee 
makes an effort to defeat the technique 
by twisting his head to the side and breathing
out the corner of his mouth
the interrogator may cup his hands around 
the detainees nose and mouth
in which case it would not be posible for him to breathe!

As we explained 
in the Section 2340A Memorandum, 
“pain and suffering” 
(as used in Section 2340) 
is best understood as a single concept, 
not distinct concepts 
of “pain” as distinguished from “suffering”… 

The waterboard,
which inflicts no pain or actual harm whatsoever, 
does not, in our view inflict “severe pain or suffering”. 
Even if one were to parse the statute more finely 
to treat “suffering” as a distinct concept, 
the waterboard could not be said to inflict severe sufering. 

The waterboard is simply a controlled acute episode, lacking the connotation of a protracted period of time generally given to suffering.

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Bureau of prisons agrees to solitary confinement review
February 5, 2013

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., announced Monday that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) has agreed to a full review of the use of solitary confinement in U.S. prisons. An independent auditor will carry out the review on the recommendations of a congressional hearing held last year by a Senate Judiciary Subcommittee chaired by Durbin.

“The United States holds more prisoners in solitary confinement than any other democratic nation in the world, and the dramatic expansion of solitary confinement is a human rights issue we can’t ignore,” noted Durbin. As Reuters noted, prisoners in isolation often are confined to small cells without windows for up to 23 hours a day. “[M]ore than half of all suicides committed in prisons occur in solitary confinement,” noted Reuters, adding that in Durbin’s state of Illinois, 56 percent of inmates have spent some time in segregated housing.