Iraq prison abuse (and Chalabi) pt. 6 -- "U.S. admits to secret interrogation site in Baghdad"

"That's not to say somebody didn't get their head dunked in the water," he said.

oy vey

The documents, which include statements by four of the seven MPs now charged in the abuse scandal, provide several new insights into the unfolding case. For instance, they contain tantalizing hints about the role of military intelligence operating in the shadows of Tier 1A at the prison. One military police officer said in a sworn statement that civilian and military intelligence officers frequently visited Tier 1A at night, spiriting detainees away for questioning out of sight of the MPs inside a "wood hut" behind the prison building.

Also, a bit about Graner which reminds me why I can easily and casually hate conflation of theology and power:

The abuse case began to unfold when Darby returned to Abu Ghraib from leave in November and heard about a shooting at the prison's "hard site," which contains Tier 1A, he told military investigators. He said that he asked the MP in charge of the tier's night shift, Spec. Charles A. Graner Jr., if he had any photographs of the cell where the shooting took place.

Darby said Graner handed him two CDs of photographs.

"I thought the discs just had pictures of Iraq, the cell where the shooting occurred," Darby told investigators.

Instead, Darby said, he viewed hundreds of photographs showing naked detainees being abused by U.S. soldiers.

"It was just wrong," Darby said. "I knew I had to do something."

He said that he asked Graner, a Pennsylvania prison guard in civilian life, about the photographs. Graner replied: "The Christian in me says it's wrong, but the corrections officer in me says, 'I love to make a grown man piss himself.' "

Speaking of the Times, though -- "Dogs and Other Harsh Tactics Linked to Military Intelligence" reads the headline, and an interesting paragraph here:

The documents assembled by Army investigators starting in January and obtained by The New York Times cite accounts by American dog handlers who say the use of military working dogs in interrogations at Abu Ghraib was approved by Col. Thomas M. Pappas, the commander of the 205th Military Intelligence Brigade. Previously, Pentagon and Army officials have said that only the top American commander, Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, could have approved the use of the animals for interrogations. A "memorandum for the record" issued on Oct. 9 by the Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at the prison listed as permissible a number of interrogation procedures that Army officials have said were allowed only with approval from General Sanchez. Among other things, the memorandum said the use of dogs in interrogations and the confining of prisoners to isolation cells was permitted in some cases without a prior approval from General Sanchez.

Over the last two months, state troopers and police officers around New Jersey have donated about 1,000 outdated, surplus bulletproof vests they owned, all in the spirit of making the thin-skinned, vulnerable Humvees safer for the soldiers and marines who ride them, Mrs. Boggiano said.

The war in Iraq has cost more than $100 billion so far, but with fighting dragging on into a second year, troops are complaining that equipment is lacking, and what is there has been worn with time. National Guard troops are saying they are being sent off to Iraq without the necessary gear to protect them from the roadside bombs and sniper shots that have become the everyday business of the war.

The guy said that uncoventional/non-standard modification of humvees was allowed, but i haven't seen pics or any followup confirmation of the guys over there tricking out their humvees Mad Max-style, altho by this point, you think they would.

For fukc's sake. you've got to wonder about the mindset, eh?

Consider, however, another take.

(I have to ask where Stuart and to a lesser extent Don W. have been on these threads for the last couple of days, I'm honestly curious.)

I don't think that, in that so much money, time, diplomatic effort, etc. has been sunk into Iraq that even if they wanted to (and if it was in the slightest way feasible), the resources aren't there at present. Course, if you wanted to then say in turn that it sure is interesting how the US has forces on either side of Iran right now...

Fighters loyal to the radical Shia cleric, Moqtada Sadr, have agreed to withdraw from the centre of Karbala.

The holy Iraqi city has seen heavy fighting between the militia and coalition forces over the past month.

US troops began pulling out on Friday and there has been intense pressure for Mr Sadr's fighters to follow suit.

In Karbala the streets are reported to be quiet, with little sign of the fighters.

A senior member of Mr Sadr's Mehdi Army, Ali al-Kazali, told the AFP news agency that the fighters had laid down their arms, following weeks of efforts by Iraqi tribal and religious leaders to negotiate a truce with the militia.

The US-led coalition has refused to negotiate directly with Mr Sadr, who is wanted in connection with the murder of a rival Shia cleric last year.

Brig Gen Mark Kimmit denied any reports of a truce.

He repeated that the confrontation could only be resolved peacefully if Mr Sadr handed himself in and disbanded his army.

According to an article in the New York Post, of all places, the Bush administration's dramatic turn against Ahmed Chalabi and the INC was precipitated by a dossier which King Abdullah of Jordan brought with him on his recent visit to the White House.

The dossier, writes Niles Lathem, included details of INC "Mafia-style extortion rackets and secret information on U.S. military operations being passed to Iran."

This provides a key piece of background information on the reports from last night that the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that Chalabi's INC 'intelligence operation' was in fact a front for Iranian intelligence, filtering the US WMD disinformation prior to the war and sending highly classified American military intelligence to the Iranians since the beginning of the occupation. The charges center on Aras Karim, Chalabi's intelligence chief.

Presented last fall with a detailed catalog of abuses at Abu Ghraib prison, the American military responded on Dec. 24 with a confidential letter asserting that many Iraqi prisoners were not entitled to the full protections of the Geneva Conventions.

The letter, drafted by military lawyers and signed by Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski, emphasized the "military necessity" of isolating some inmates at the prison for interrogation because of their "significant intelligence value," and said that prisoners held as security risks could legally be treated differently from prisoners of war or ordinary criminals.

But the military insisted that there were "clear procedures governing interrogation to ensure approaches do not amount to inhumane treatment."

In recent public statements, Bush administration officials have said that the Geneva Conventions were "fully applicable" in Iraq. That has put American-run prisons in Iraq in a different category from those in Afghanistan and in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where members of Al Qaeda and the Taliban have been declared unlawful combatants not eligible for protection. However, the Dec. 24 letter appears to undermine administration assertions of the conventions' broad application in Iraq.

President Bush will share a "clear strategy" for guiding the future of Iraq in a speech intended to convince a world television audience that he is in command of the situation there, the White House said Friday.

Mr. Bush, whose job approval ratings have been dragged to new lows by violence and scandal in Iraq, will address an audience at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., at 8 p.m. Monday, said a White House spokesman, Trent Duffy.

"He realizes, as most Americans do, that we have difficult challenges ahead," Mr. Duffy told reporters.

"The president looks forward on Monday evening to discussing with the American people and with a global audience a clear strategy on how we need to move forward," he said. "We hope that Americans will take the opportunity to listen. It's an important speech. It's an important time."

Yes, it is, isn't it?

"There may have been some kind of celebration," Kimmitt said. "Bad people have celebrations too. Bad people have parties too."

Those darn bad people! And they weren't even carrying wallets, they have to be scum!

Sat May 22, 4:20 PM ET

By ANTHONY DEUTSCH, Associated Press Writer

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The U.S. military said Saturday it has found "no evidence of a wedding" at the site of an airstrike last week near the Syrian border, and said evidence so far suggested the target was a desert base for foreign terrorists sneaking into Iraq (news - web sites)

Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, coalition deputy chief of staff for operations, showed slides of military binoculars, guns and battery packs that could be used to trigger roadside bombs found by U.S. troops at the site.

He said "terrorist manuals," telephone numbers for Afghanistan (news - web sites) and foreign passports, including one Sudanese, were also recovered there.

Survivors of the attack in Mogr el-Deeb, a desert village inhabited by members of the Bou Fahad clan, said they had just finished a wedding celebration when bombs fell before dawn Wednesday. More than 40 people were killed, including women and children.

Associated Press Television News footage taken at the site Thursday showed broken musical instruments, pieces of bloodied women's hair and the bodies of children. Kimmitt said no musical instruments were found, however.

Many of the bodies were taken about 250 miles to the east to Ramadi, the base of the clan and the capital of Anbar province which includes Mogr el-Deeb. According to Lt. Col. Ziyad al-Jbouri, the deputy police chief there, between 42 and 45 people died, including 15 children and 10 women. A local hospital doctor put the death toll at 45.
During a briefing for reporters, Kimmitt said the military was investigating the raid and had reached no final conclusions. However, he displayed pictures of some of the items found at the site.
He said suspicious materials included about 300 sets of bedding, 100 sets of prepackaged clothing as well as a "medical treatment room." He said the clothing could have been for infiltrators seeking to disguise themselves as Iraqis.
He said white powder also was found that could have been cocaine. The border area is a popular route for smugglers.
"None of the bodies had identification of any kind on them, no ID cards, no wallets, no pictures," Kimmitt said. "They had watches, and that was about the only way you could identify one person from another."
He said the absence of identification, as well as the remoteness of the area, suggested "that this was a high-risk meeting of high-level, anti-coalition forces."
The military's finding contrasts sharply with statements by survivors as well as local officials in Ramadi. On Thursday, a well-known wedding singer, Hussein al-Ali, was buried in Baghdad, and his family said he was killed in the airstrike.
Bou Fahad clansmen, who raise livestock, denied the presence of foreign fighters in their group. Members of the clan said the attack began a few hours after the wedding festivities had broken up for the night.
Kimmitt said farm vehicles were found, but that they showed no signs of being used for ranching. Nor, he added, was there evidence of any wedding celebration.
"There was no evidence of a wedding: no decorations, no musical instruments found, no large quantities of food or leftover servings one would expect from a wedding celebration," he said. "No gifts. The men were almost all of military age."
"There may have been some kind of celebration," Kimmitt said. "Bad people have celebrations, too. Bad people have parties, too, and it may have been what was seen as some kind of celebration ... may have been just a meeting in the middle of the desert by some people conducting criminal or terrorist activities."
Members of the clan said, however, that the Americans did not question them after the attack and that when some of the survivors tried to approach U.S. ground troops, they were fired on.

I as well have an unreasonable fear of bedding and undocumented clothing and the fact that scary people will use them to terrorize me. Why, just the other day, an undocumented mattress was strolling down the street, and as i yelled for the authorities - let's just say I survived. I wasn't wearing a watch, however.

. . . which could have been used to coordinate terrorist acts.

(not that they're doing it, but that they have to)

The coalition in Iraq wants its troops to remain immune from prosecution by Iraqis after the handover of power, it is reported.

Creating a sovereign Iraq should mean forces become subject to Iraqi laws.

But BBC Correspondent Jonathan Beale says UK and US forces want to remain under their own jurisdictions

oh come on. they haven't seen enough TV shows to have some pick stick a knife into one of the bags, lick it, then nod his head at his partner and say, "oh yeah, it's real"?

A military lawyer for a soldier charged in the Abu Ghraib abuse case stated that a captain at the prison said the highest-ranking U.S. military officer in Iraq was present during some "interrogations and/or allegations of the prisoner abuse," according to a recording of a military hearing obtained by The Washington Post.

The lawyer, Capt. Robert Shuck, said he was told that Army Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez and other senior military officers were aware of what was taking place on Tier 1A of Abu Ghraib. Shuck is assigned to defend Staff Sgt. Ivan L. "Chip" Frederick II of the 372nd Military Police Company. During an April 2 hearing that was open to the public, Shuck said the company commander, Capt. Donald J. Reese, was prepared to testify in exchange for immunity. The military prosecutor questioned Shuck about what Reese would say under oath.

"Are you saying that Captain Reese is going to testify that General Sanchez was there and saw this going on?" asked Capt. John McCabe, the military prosecutor.

"That's what he told me," Shuck said. "I am an officer of the court, sir, and I would not lie. I have got two children at home. I'm not going to risk my career."

"I believe we are absolutely on the brink of failure," retired Marine Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, a former commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "We are looking into the abyss. We cannot start soon enough to begin the turnaround."

"If the current situation persists, we will continue fighting one form of Iraqi insurgency after another — with too little legitimacy, too little will and too few resources," warned Larry Diamond, a former advisor to the U.S. occupation authority in Baghdad. "There is only one word for a situation in which you cannot win and you cannot withdraw: Quagmire."

Hoar and Diamond's assessments were grimmer than most. But the two men were far from alone.

--

"A detailed plan is necessary to prove to our allies and to Iraqis that we have a strategy, and that we are committed to making it work," Lugar told administration officials at a hearing. "If we cannot provide this clarity, we risk the loss of support of the American people, loss of potential contributions from our allies and the disillusionment of Iraqis."

Leslie H. Gelb, a former president of the private Council on Foreign Relations — and a top Pentagon strategist during the Vietnam War — said he had never seen confidence sink as quickly in Washington as it has in recent weeks.

"I've never heard the kind of dark defeatism I'm hearing now, both in and out of government, including the worst days of the Vietnam War," said Gelb, a Democrat. "Support for this war is plummeting. In Vietnam, that happened much more slowly, and only after much higher casualties."

--

Some traditional Republican conservatives have begun to charge that "neoconservatives" have led their party — and their president — astray with expansive foreign ambitions.

"We need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts, a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy, by force if necessary," Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the conservative chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a speech. "Liberty cannot be laid down like so much Astroturf. Law and order must come first."

Some administration officials acknowledge that they are already thinking about deferring the original goal of a thriving multiethnic democracy in Iraq to seek a more modest target of stabilizing the country under a more-or-less "representative" government.

In public, Bush still says he is aiming at nothing less than democracy — and that Iraq is getting there.

"An Iraqi democracy is emerging," the president said last week. "Iraq now has an independent judiciary, a free market, a new currency, more than 200 newspapers in circulation, and schools free of hateful propaganda…. In time, Iraq will be a free and democratic nation at the heart of the Middle East. This will send a message — a powerful message — from Damascus to Tehran: that democracy can bring hope to lives in every culture."

But at lower levels of the administration, Marr said, the goal has changed.

"We are in a desperate state there," she said.

"We don't have any security in the country…. The big agenda now has to be jettisoned. The big agenda was: We're going to create a democracy and spread it around the region," Marr said. "They have a much more realistic goal now in Iraq: stability."

Ahmad Chalabi, the onetime White House favorite who has been implicated in an alleged Iranian spy operation, sent Iraqi defectors to at least eight Western spy services before the war in an apparent effort to dupe them about Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's illicit weapons programs, current and former U.S. intelligence officials said.

U.S. investigators are seeking to determine whether the effort — which one U.S. official likened to an attempt to "game the system" — was secretly supported by Iran's intelligence service to help persuade the Bush administration to oust the regime in Baghdad, Tehran's longtime enemy.

"We need to restrain what are growing U.S. messianic instincts, a sort of global social engineering where the United States feels it is both entitled and obligated to promote democracy, by force if necessary," Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), the conservative chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a speech. "Liberty cannot be laid down like so much Astroturf. Law and order must come first."

Not that Roberts is in the White House directly or necessarily my friend politically (if anything I read a certain isolationism into this as a subtext, which I'm not fond of), but this is a cold slap of a statement towards the perceived role of us as ever so special, and one hardly to be dismissed as 'liberal whining' or what have you.

Chalabi said the CIA, which had viewed his Iraqi National Congress group with skepticism for years, was trying to discredit him and that CIA Director George Tenet was behind the accusation that he gave American secrets to Iran.

"These charges are being put out by George Tenet. Let him come to Congress. I will come to Congress, and I will lay everything on the table. Let Congress decide," Chalabi said on "Fox News Sunday."

A U.S. intelligence official, calling Chalabi's assertions absurd, said his willingness to testify under oath before Congress "would be viewed as a positive development."

Anthony Cordesman, a leading Iraq expert and early supporter of the war, wrote in a recent report that while the United States is not yet defeated in Iraq militarily or politically, there is now the threat of "a serious strategic defeat."

"It may not be possible to avoid some form of defeat, but the U.S. must make every effort to do so," wrote Cordesman, of the Center for Strategic and International Studies here.

--

President George W. Bush is still talking about Iraq as if nothing had changed, but even his most zealous Pentagon aides - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz - admit serious mistakes for the first time and concede that victory is not necessarily assured.

The Republican Party is increasingly split over Iraq, between isolationist conservatives and interventionist neoconservatives, and between rally-around-the-troops House members and moderate Republicans in the Senate. When Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz testify before a Senate committee now, they are almost as likely to be blasted by Republicans as by Democrats.

--

"It depends on the definition of success," said Noah Feldman, a New York University law professor and former adviser to the U.S. occupation in Iraq. "At this point the most optimistic definition of success - the warmest, fuzziest dreams of Paul Wolfowitz - I think are thoroughly dashed. The creation of a liberal, secular democracy was never realistic and it's understood now that it's not going to happen."

Rashid Khalidy, who heads the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, also says the United States has failed at its original goals, though he defines them differently.

"I'm actually afraid that failure in terms of the objectives that were initially [set] is absolutely an inevitability," he said. "I don't think the U.S. can keep bases in Iraq. I don't think we're going to have a pliable Iraqi government that will do what we want and I don't think we're going to have a privileged position vis-a-vis Iraqi oil."

Certainly, many of the war's original supporters remain optimistic about a positive outcome.

"This war was never about making Iraqis love us," said Danielle Ptelka of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based think tank. "It was about getting rid of one of the most brutal dictators the world knows, and we did that. This isn't a Hallmark card."

She said, "It's very hard for me to take seriously the gloominess of people who were opposed to the enterprise in the first place. Those are people who never wanted to win."

--

Experts say one positive sign, if expectations are seriously lowered, is that Fallujah, the locus of the Sunni insurgency, is relatively calm after the recent confrontation, though roadside bombs are still exploding just outside the city. But that fragile stability was accomplished at great cost: handing over the city to former generals in Saddam Hussein's army and some fighters who are part of the insurgency.

The implication, some experts say, is that people who resemble Hussein in outlook will control the largely Sunni center of the country in the future.

The decision to hand the city to former generals and insurgents was made by U.S. officers on the ground, not Pentagon civilians, and is seen here as a sign that generals are beginning to reclaim power from neoconservative civilians like Wolfowitz.

Another such sign is that the overall commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Gen. John Abizaid, has called for and gotten more troops on the ground when predecessors were told not to even ask.

Another positive sign as seen from Washington is last week's call by Ayatollah Ali Sistani for his fellow Shia Iraqis to stay away from fighting in Najaf, a direct repudiation of Shia insurgent leader Muqtada al-Sadr.

Given a greater realism on the ground, some experts believe there is a moderate chance of achieving a relatively stable and more benign government, at least relative to Hussein's.

"I think that Iraq may indeed, in spite of everything, have a reasonable chance of being a free country," Khalidy said. "It won't be something frankly that the U.S. will have contributed a huge amount to."

"We will not accomplish the transformational outcome that so many people aspired to as the rationale for the war," Feldman said. "So for many people, relative to where we started, it is already a failure."

But most of the pictures seem part of a larger confluence of torture and pornography: a young woman leading a naked man around on a leash is classic dominatrix imagery. And you wonder how much of the sexual tortures inflicted on the inmates of Abu Ghraib was inspired by the vast repertory of pornographic imagery available on the Internet -- and which ordinary people, by sending out Webcasts of themselves, try to emulate.

Also, the article shows a number of photos uncropped, so you see folks like some dude to the side of the guy in hood and with wires checking his fingernails or something equally banal. Hannah Arendt to thread!

She really loses me when she tries talking about how delight in violence is becoming more endemic in American life. While that's a perfectly plausible claim, her evidence is kinda weak. I hafta say that if she wonders "can the video game 'Interrogating the Terrorists' really be far behind?" then she's got only the most schematic understanding of what playing video games are like. (An interrogration game would be waaaaay too static, right?) Plus, while this is cold comfort to those who undergo them now, really, American hazing rituals have always been pretty bad. It was very common in the early part of this century for colleges (and even high schools) to have hazing days where freshman and sophomore classes would gather together and basically beat the fucking crap out of each other in broad daylight, with school administrations at best only making only token efforts to stop the carnage. (The mass entry of American GIs into higher education after WWII pretty much put a stop to that in colleges.) Plus, if you're going to argue that delight in violence and torture has grown in American life in recent years, maybe you don't want to use events in a film that takes place thirty years ago as evidence.

she's explicitly rejected her conclusions in "on photography" for at least a decade now, for what it's worth.

A senior US general says a set of four special interrogation techniques have been used on two key detainees at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
But he insisted the techniques conform to the Geneva Conventions and that all the prisoners are treated humanely.

June 8, 2004
LEGAL OPINIONS
Lawyers Decided Bans on Torture Didn't Bind Bush
By NEIL A. LEWIS and ERIC SCHMITT

WASHINGTON, June 7 — A team of administration lawyers concluded in a March 2003 legal memorandum that President Bush was not bound by either an international treaty prohibiting torture or by a federal antitorture law because he had the authority as commander in chief to approve any technique needed to protect the nation's security.

The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons.

One reason, the lawyers said, would be if military personnel believed that they were acting on orders from superiors "except where the conduct goes so far as to be patently unlawful."

"In order to respect the president's inherent constitutional authority to manage a military campaign," the lawyers wrote in the 56-page confidential memorandum, the prohibition against torture "must be construed as inapplicable to interrogation undertaken pursuant to his commander-in-chief authority."

Senior Pentagon officials on Monday sought to minimize the significance of the March memo, one of several obtained by The New York Times, as an interim legal analysis that had no effect on revised interrogation procedures that Mr. Rumsfeld approved in April 2003 for the American military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

"The April document was about interrogation techniques and procedures," said Lawrence Di Rita, the Pentagon's chief spokesman. "It was not a legal analysis."

Mr. Di Rita said the 24 interrogation procedures permitted at Guantánamo, four of which required Mr. Rumsfeld's explicit approval, did not constitute torture and were consistent with international treaties.

The March memorandum, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal on Monday, is the latest internal legal study to be disclosed that shows that after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks the administration's lawyers were set to work to find legal arguments to avoid restrictions imposed by international and American law.

A Jan. 22, 2002, memorandum from the Justice Department that provided arguments to keep American officials from being charged with war crimes for the way prisoners were detained and interrogated was used extensively as a basis for the March memorandum on avoiding proscriptions against torture.

The previously disclosed Justice Department memorandum concluded that administration officials were justified in asserting that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to detainees from the Afghanistan war.

Another memorandum obtained by The Times indicates that most of the administration's top lawyers, with the exception of those at the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, approved of the Justice Department's position that the Geneva Conventions did not apply to the war in Afghanistan. In addition, that memorandum, dated Feb. 2, 2002, noted that lawyers for the Central Intelligence Agency had asked for an explicit understanding that the administration's public pledge to abide by the spirit of the conventions did not apply to its operatives.

The March memo, a copy of which was obtained by The Times, was prepared as part of a review of interrogation techniques by a working group appointed by the Defense Department's general counsel, William J. Haynes. The group itself was led by the Air Force general counsel, Mary Walker, and included military and civilian lawyers from all branches of the armed services.

The review stemmed from concerns raised by Pentagon lawyers and interrogators at Guantánamo after Mr. Rumsfeld approved a set of harsher interrogation techniques in December 2002 to use on a Saudi detainee, Mohamed al-Kahtani, who was believed to be the planned 20th hijacker in the Sept. 11 terror plot.

Mr. Rumsfeld suspended the harsher techniques, including serving the detainee cold, prepackaged food instead of hot rations and shaving off his facial hair, on Jan. 12, pending the outcome of the working group's review. Gen. James T. Hill, head of the military's Southern Command, which oversees Guantánamo, told reporters last Friday that the working group "wanted to do what is humane and what is legal and consistent not only with" the Geneva Conventions, but also "what is right for our soldiers."

Mr. Di Rita said that the Pentagon officials were focused primarily on the interrogation techniques, and that the legal rationale included in the March memo was mostly prepared by the Justice Department and White House counsel's office.

The memo showed that not only lawyers from the Defense and Justice departments and the White House approved of the policy but also that David S. Addington, the counsel to Vice President Dick Cheney, also was involved in the deliberations. The State Department lawyer, William H. Taft IV, dissented, warning that such a position would weaken the protections of the Geneva Conventions for American troops.

The March 6 document about torture provides tightly constructed definitions of torture. For example, if an interrogator "knows that severe pain will result from his actions, if causing such harm is not his objective, he lacks the requisite specific intent even though the defendant did not act in good faith," the report said. "Instead, a defendant is guilty of torture only if he acts with the express purpose of inflicting severe pain or suffering on a person within his control."

The adjective "severe," the report said, "makes plain that the infliction of pain or suffering per se, whether it is physical or mental, is insufficient to amount to torture. Instead, the text provides that pain or suffering must be `severe.' " The report also advised that if an interrogator "has a good faith belief his actions will not result in prolonged mental harm, he lacks the mental state necessary for his actions to constitute torture."

The report also said that interrogators could justify breaching laws or treaties by invoking the doctrine of necessity. An interrogator using techniques that cause harm might be immune from liability if he "believed at the moment that his act is necessary and designed to avoid greater harm."

Scott Horton, the former head of the human rights committee of the Association of the Bar of the City of New York, said Monday that he believed that the March memorandum on avoiding responsibility for torture was what caused a delegation of military lawyers to visit him and complain privately about the administration's confidential legal arguments. That visit, he said, resulted in the association undertaking a study and issuing of a report criticizing the administration. He added that the lawyers who drafted the torture memo in March could face professional sanctions.

Jamie Fellner, the director of United States programs for Human Rights Watch, said Monday, "We believe that this memo shows that at the highest levels of the Pentagon there was an interest in using torture as well as a desire to evade the criminal consequences of doing so."

The March memorandum also contains a curious section in which the lawyers argued that any torture committed at Guantánamo would not be a violation of the anti-torture statute because the base was under American legal jurisdiction and the statute concerns only torture committed overseas. That view is in direct conflict with the position the administration has taken in the Supreme Court, where it has argued that prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are not entitled to constitutional protections because the base is outside American jurisdiction.

Kate Zernike contributed reporting for this article.

ps: I want to stab John Ashcroft

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/8872673.htm

Big John also worked in a 'how dare you question dear leader in this serious time of war' comment. bastard.

By TERENCE CHEA, Associated Press Writer

SAN FRANCISCO - A California National Guardsman says three fellow soldiers brazenly abused detainees during interrogation sessions in an Iraqi police station, threatening them with guns, sticking lit cigarettes in their ears and choking them until they collapsed.

Sgt. Greg Ford said he repeatedly had to revive prisoners who had passed out, and once saw a soldier stand on the back of a handcuffed detainee's neck and pull his arms until they popped out of their sockets.

"I had to intervene because they couldn't keep their hands off of them," said Ford, part of a four-member team from the 223rd Military Intelligence Battalion that questioned detainees last year in Samarra, north of Baghdad.

Ford's commanding officers deny any abuse occurred, and say investigations within their battalion and by the Army's Criminal Investigation Division determined they had done nothing wrong.

"All the allegations were found to be untrue, totally unfounded and in a number of cases completely fabricated," said the battalion commander, Lt. Col. Drew Ryan.

Ford's allegations are being further investigated by the CID, which would not comment on the probe.

Ford told The Associated Press that when he reported the problems last June to his commanding officers, they pressured him to drop his claims.

"Immediately, within the same conversation, the command said, `Nope, you're delusional, you're crazy, it never happened.' They gave me 30 seconds to withdraw my request for an investigation," Ford said. "I stood my ground."

When he insisted on an official investigation, they ordered him to see combat stress counselors, who sent him out of Iraq, he said.

Ford said he did not hear from investigators until the release of photographs of mistreatment inside the Abu Ghraib prison provoked worldwide outrage and prompted a review of other allegations of abuse.

Ford, 49, said has worked for 18 years as a state prison guard and has more than 30 years of military experience. He was sent out of Iraq last June and, after about six months in Fort Lewis, Wash., returned home to the Sacramento suburb of Fair Oaks.

He said his three fellow team members were not properly trained to do interrogations and got carried away with their power.

"You weren't supposed to stand on their neck or put lit cigarettes in their ears. Twice I had to pull burning cigarettes out of detainees' ears," Ford said. "I said, `Look, this is not going to go over well with the community of Samarra.' Our people basically ignored all the warnings."

Ford said the soldiers routinely brought guns into the interrogation room, and he once saw his team leader pointing a pistol at a detainee's head.

The three accused soldiers were not available for comment, a California National Guard spokesman said.

Ford was one of about 100 members of the San Francisco-based 223rd who arrived in Iraq last spring and spread out in teams of three to six interrogators, Arabic linguists and counterintelligence officers. The battalion returned home in March.

The abuse Ford said he witnessed took place from April to June in a small interrogation room. Whenever a prisoner collapsed, his team's leader would emerge and say, "Greg, I think we've got another accident," said Ford, who has medical training. "Then I'd have to bring them out and revive them."

Ford said he told the team leader that if one of the Iraqis died, he would testify against him in a court-martial. "He basically laughed it off. At that point, I was persona non-grata," the sergeant said.

So Ford asked to be relieved from his position, prompting a visit by his commander, Capt. Vic Artiga, and Lt. Col. Ryan, who "were too busy threatening me to do any proper investigation," Ford said.

Ryan and Artiga would not discuss the details of Ford's allegations but denied pressuring Ford to drop his claims. They said they did an immediate investigation, which cleared all the soldiers.

"I'm very confident that my soldiers acted professionally, ethically and within the law, as did I," Artiga said.

But Ford said nobody interviewed him while he was in Iraq and he does not think anyone has interviewed the Iraqi detainees. Artiga also said he does not believe Iraqis were interviewed for the battalion's investigation.

After leaving Iraq, Ford underwent psychiatric evaluations at military installations in Germany and San Antonio, and said those evaluations found nothing wrong with him.

Well, it's been all over NPR, for what that's worth. That's where I heard about it.

VOICE OF THE PEOPLE (LETTER)

The generous spirit that is uniquely American
Advertisement
Henry J. Hyde (R-Ill.), Chairman, Committee on International Relations U.S. House of Representatives

June 9, 2004

Washington, D.C. -- I am writing in regard to "Pope despairs of America's `soulless' vision; Pontiff warns George, Midwest bishops not to let flock stray amid lure of materialism" (Page 1, May 29). As a practicing Catholic, I revere the Holy Father. In addition to his spiritual guidance, he has been a consistent voice for freedom and was the single greatest force in the defeat of communism.
It, therefore, is painful when the Holy Father, or those who speak for him, fall into the error of depicting America and Americans as having a "soulless vision of the world," one characterized by an excessive materialism and a drift away from our "spiritual roots."
I am not so foolish as to believe that the U.S. is not capable of mistakes and errors of judgment. And it would be hubris to overlook our many failings. Certainly our society's tolerance of abortion and its attendant culture of death is a far more damning indictment than is the pope's most recent criticism.
But these papal remarks, coming as they did near Memorial Day, need to be answered, because, despite my admiring reverence for the Holy Father, he is absolutely wrong in referring to the U.S. as "soulless." The most direct response to this characterization would be to cite the persistent religiosity of Americans, a striking quality repeatedly remarked upon by foreigners throughout our history. The high levels of attendance at formal religious services and the widespread belief in a supreme being are in sharp contrast with Europe, where secularism reigns as an unquestioned ideology and the legacy of Marxist materialism has devastated the spiritual capabilities of half of the continent.
As for our broader culture, any depiction of it as "soulless" can arise only from a profound misperception, given that its exuberance and endless creativity emerge from the "pursuit of happiness" that our founding documents declare to be a God-given right. It is pervaded by a celebration of life, in sharp contrast to the desiccation and frozen tradition that so often characterizes the swaddled cultures of our critics.
Nor should our wealth be equated with materialism. No one is more obsessed with material needs and desires than a hungry man. We have been blessed with enormous wealth, but what is too often overlooked is our unprecedentedly generous sharing of this blessing with others.
It would take several pages of this newspaper to recount even a fraction of the resources that the United States has devoted toward alleviating the world's poverty and disease--resources unparalleled in scale and breadth by any other country or international organization.
But that recounting should not be limited merely to the efforts undertaken by our government. The enormous scale of private philanthropy and the ubiquity of volunteering by individuals throughout our society simply have no parallel in any other country. These are uniquely American. In other countries, the obligations each human owes to his fellow creatures are too often disposed of by shedding these duties to the distant cold sterility of a government program, thereby freeing citizens from the onerous weight of caring for others. Curiously this refusal to burden themselves with a personal responsibility for others is coupled with a self-image of moral superiority and a determination to instruct us and others regarding our duty.
More often than not, our critics in Europe and elsewhere who are so quick to point out our failings, real and imagined, regard themselves as members of an elite class and thus reflexively dismiss what they see as our crude, populist, non-elitist culture. Their characterization is in many ways correct, as our culture was, in fact, created by and for the common man and grants to each individual, no matter how lowly his origin or station, a basic dignity that need not be earned or bestowed by his betters because it is his by right.
The reality is that the United States attracts so much criticism because our ideals are so high, our record so consistently positive, that others eagerly seize upon our inevitable blemishes in an effort to demonstrate that our achievements are but pretensions and that we are, in fact, no different from all the rest. But who expects shining results from Russia, China, France, Brazil, Nigeria, Iran or any other country? Or is surprised by their meager contribution to the world?
The reality is that the standards others set for us, that we set for ourselves, rest in a class by themselves, so gloriously higher than that of any other country. In his heart, I know the Holy Father knows these things, and he has expressed his love for our beloved country many times.
I salute the flag because we remain the strongest, bravest, most compassionate nation that has ever existed. To an extent unparalleled in history, whatever security, happiness and prosperity that exist in the world rest heavily on sacrifices this country has made, sacrifices that include our dear warriors fighting for our country and for nameless others on foreign soil, sacrifices that we do honor to ourselves in remembering.

yeah, this had me seeing red.

Scientists Say Dirty Bomb Would Be a Dud
Wed Jun 9, 1:59 PM ET

By CHARLES J. HANLEY, AP Special Correspondent

NEW YORK - The "dirty bomb" allegedly planned by terror suspect Jose Padilla would have been a dud, not the radiological threat portrayed last week by federal authorities, scientists say.

At a June 1 news conference, the Justice Department said the alleged al-Qaida associate hoped to attack Americans by detonating "uranium wrapped with explosives" in order to spread radioactivity.

But uranium's extremely low radioactivity is harmless compared with high-radiation materials — such as cesium and cobalt isotopes used in medicine and industry that experts see as potential dirty bomb fuels.

"I used a 20-pound brick of uranium as a doorstop in my office," American nuclear physicist Peter D. Zimmerman, of King's College in London, said to illustrate the point.

Zimmerman, co-author of an expert analysis of dirty bombs for the U.S. National Defense University, said last week's government announcement was "extremely disturbing — because you cannot make a radiological dispersal device with uranium. There is just no significant radiation hazard."

Other specialists agreed. "It's the equivalent of blowing up lead," said physicist Ivan Oelrich of the Federation of American Scientists.

When Padilla was arrested in June 2002, after returning to Chicago from Afghanistan and Pakistan, Attorney General John Ashcroft said the ex-Chicago gang member and Muslim convert had planned a dirty bomb that could "cause mass death and injury." Washington, D.C., was the likely target, his department said.

But it wasn't until Deputy Attorney General James Comey's briefing for reporters last week that authorities said Padilla had uranium in mind for his radiological dispersal device, or RDD, the technical term for such a weapon. Comey said the detainee disclosed he'd also been sent to set off natural gas explosions in U.S. apartment buildings.

"Just saying the word `uranium,' the public automatically assumes, `Oh, it sounds bad,'" said physicist Charles Ferguson of the Washington office of California's Monterey Institute of International Studies. He co-authored one of the most detailed reports on the dirty-bomb threat.

Those studying the RDD potential envision a combination of explosives with a lethal radioisotope, such as cesium-137, diverted from use in cancer radiotherapy, for example, or from machines that irradiate food. Particularly if in powder form, it could spew intense radioactivity over a section of a city, making it uninhabitable.

Radiation from uranium, on the other hand, is billions of times less intense than that of cesium-137, cobalt-60 and other radioisotopes. It's not radioactivity but another property of uranium — its ability in some forms to sustain atomic chain reactions — that makes it a fuel for nuclear power and bombs.

The Justice Department didn't respond directly when asked this week whether it had consulted with experts and knew that uranium wouldn't make a dirty bomb.

Instead, spokesman Mark Corallo said Padilla's statements, in view of his al-Qaida links, made clear that he was "willing to cause devastating harm to innocent Americans."

Padilla has been held by the U.S. military since 2002 as an enemy combatant, without charge and with little access to lawyers. The Bush administration has been criticized for denying a U.S. citizen normal access to the courts. The Supreme Court is considering whether the government, in defending against terrorism, has such power.

Padilla's lawyer, Donna Newman, said Wednesday of the dirty-bomb allegation that U.S. authorities "should have known that this was nonsense."

"When they frightened everybody, what were they trying to do, if they knew better? To show the administration is on top of things?" she asked.

She wants the government to attempt to indict and try her client. "Maybe the problem is the evidence is so weak, it's laughable," she said.

Comey said the news conference was called "to help people understand the nature of the threat" Padilla posed.

Based on what he said were Padilla's admissions to interrogators, he described a "highly trained al-Qaida soldier" who accepted an assignment to blow up U.S. apartment buildings, and "planned to do even more by detonating a radiological device, a dirty bomb, in this country."

Spokesman Corallo reaffirmed this week that it was Padilla who said uranium would be used.

"If that's what he planned," physicist Oelrich said of Padilla, "it shows he doesn't know what he's talking about and hasn't done even rudimentary homework."

He wasn't the only one, according to a Justice Department summary of interrogations.

It said Abu Zubaydah, a top al-Qaida lieutenant now in U.S. custody, also envisioned a uranium device when urging Padilla to mount a U.S. attack. At another point, however, the summary said Zubaydah told Padilla the dirty bomb was "not as easy to do as they thought."

Padilla claims "he was never really planning to go through with" any of the terrorist assignment, Comey told reporters.

As a heavy metal, like lead, uranium poses one health risk: If ingested or inhaled, it can damage kidneys or other organs. But unlike radioisotopes, byproducts of nuclear reactors, uranium doesn't emit penetrating gamma rays that cause acute radiation poisoning. Instead, it slowly radiates weak alpha particles, which don't even penetrate skin.

"Granted, it (uranium) could have a psychological effect" because of unfounded fears, said physicist Ferguson. But he said a government information campaign should quell any panic if such a weapon appeared.

Though Hyde lent such eloquence to his position, there are specific reasons to reject the reasons Hyde gave and therefore all of his rhetoric, based upon his past. The reason to reject the self-righteous attitude he took in terms of Clinton’s cheating is because for eight years including some time in Congress, he was having an affair with a married woman. What discredits his rule of law argument is the stance he took during the trial of Senator Dan Crane and during the Iran-Contra scandal.

Eight years of his married life Hyde enjoyed having an affair with a married woman named Cherie Snodgrass. The relationship even continued for two years after Hyde’s wife found out about it, which incidentally was the same time that Cherie found out that that there even was a Mrs. Hyde. How could a man who held a very public seven year affair while in office even begin to cast judgment on someone who traveled the same path, much less in the name of family values? The whole Snodgrass family blamed Hyde for their split, which occurred because Cherie’s husband found out and Cherie wanted to stay with Hyde who encouraged her to do so:

On September 16, 1998, Hyde issued the following statement: "The statute of limitations has long since passed on my youthful indiscretions. Suffice it to say Cherie Snodgrass and I were good friends a long, long time ago. After Mr. Snodgrass confronted my wife, the friendship ended, and my marriage remained intact. The only purpose for this being dredged up now is an obvious attempt to intimidate me and it won’t work. I intend to fulfill my constitutional duty and deal judiciously with the serious felony allegations presented to Congress in the Starr report." (Bernstein, 54)

Mondo Washington
by James Ridgeway
Something Smells
Padilla's alleged gas plot reeks; so does Justice's 'openness'
June 8th, 2004 10:30 AM
Related:

When Jose Padilla was arrested by the FBI at Chicago's O'Hare Airport on May 8, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft enthusiastically announced he had caught a man set to explode a radioactive dirty bomb in New York City or Washington. The White House subsequently suggested that Ashcroft had overstated the case. And others thought Padilla didn't amount to much. "Jose Padilla is a throwaway," says ex-CIA agent Vincent Cannistraro. "He was not involved in any core Al Qaeda operations." Last week, Deputy Attorney General James Comey said that if he tried to bring criminal charges against Padilla in federal court, they wouldn't stick, and Padilla "would likely have ended up a free man."

Padilla went to the Middle East, was trained in explosives in Afghanistan, and met the Al Qaeda top command, according to the Justice Department. In June 2001, according to Comey's account, Mohammed Atef, the Al Qaeda military chief (later killed by the Americans), "asked his American disciple if he was willing to undertake a mission to blow up apartment buildings in the United States using natural gas. Padilla told him he would do it." Comey said Padilla and another man "learned about switches and circuits and timers. They learned how to seal an apartment, trap the natural gas, and to prepare an explosion using that gas that would have maximum yield and destroy an apartment building."

Padilla, said the government, was then given $15,000, a cell phone, travel documents, and an e-mail address, and was sent on his way to O'Hare, where the FBI arrested him.

Blowing up a building with natural gas could turn out to be a pretty dubious proposition. Chris Olert, a spokesperson for Con Ed, when asked whether he had ever come across a case of natural gas being used to intentionally blow up an apartment building, replies, "No." Asked whether this was something Con Ed feared might happen, Olert says, "No, I don't believe so."

Daphne Magnuson, a spokesperson for the American Gas Association, which represents natural gas utilities, says, "You would have to have the perfect mix of factors" to use natural gas for an explosion, and "it would have to be mixed with the right amount of oxygen." And you must have a source of ignition. In addition, she notes, gas has the very strong odorant mercaptan added to it, which makes it difficult to have a leak without people noticing it.

The only such incident in recent history in New York was the Stuyvesant Town explosion in February 2003, says New York Fire Department spokesperson Michael Loughran. A judge was convicted of reckless endangerment for causing the blast. "The explosion did not cause a fire," Loughran adds. "It was a flash explosion. The only damage was to an interior wall of the apartment, and there was no structural damage to the building.

Reversing itself, the Army said Tuesday that a G.I. was discharged partly because of a head injury he suffered while posing as an uncooperative detainee during a training exercise at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The Army had previously said Specialist Sean Baker's medical discharge in April was unrelated to the injury he received last year at the detention center, where the United States holds suspected terrorists.

Mr. Baker, 37, a former member of the 438th Military Police Company, said he played the role of an uncooperative prisoner and was beaten so badly by four American soldiers that he suffered a traumatic brain injury and seizures. He said the soldiers only stopped beating him when they realized he might be American.

Bruce Simpson, Mr. Baker's lawyer, said his client is considering a lawsuit.

I suspect this phrase will be increasingly common.

*kick, punch, gouge. kick kick kick*
"Dude, Abdul here is wearing a Creed t-shirt. Should we like, stop yet?"

*chorus* NO!

"Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"

After Welch's dressing-down and a burst of applause from the gallery, the rattled McCarthy turned to Cohn and said, "What happened?

Biden's treatment of Asscroft was spot on "that's not hypothetical" indeed.

Rumsfeld approved Guantanamo interrogation methods such as "stress positions" and "fear of dogs" amid a terror alert in December 2002.

The lame responses by John Ashcroft to the evidence in leaked memos that the Bush administration condoned torture with the personal approval of the president are damning. It's even more damning that Ashcroft will not release a critical memo, prepared by his department, making the point that some forms of torture, if approved by the president, would not be illegal. I'm hoping to write at length about this, but let me say one thing. I should have spoken up earlier. The signs were there - including the decision to ignore the Geneva Conventions with regard to al Qaeda in Guantanamo. In a very small number of cases, this might have been a debatable question. But what we have clearly seen is a green light from the very top condoning at best mistreatment and abuse of prisoners of war in a whole slew of cases. We'll see as more facts emerge what the truth is. But the brutality of U.S. forces against prisoners in their care and custody is now public record - and a permanent mark of shame for the United States.

Meanwhile, Talking Points found this editorial condemning the twists and turns. Should I mention that this editorial was published in Bush's home state?

The United States' moral authority to call for the rule of law and respect for human rights has been undermined by legal machinations the Bush administration undertook to justify torturing prisoners taken in the war on terror.

Administration officials have attempted to downplay the significance of a March 6, 2003, Justice Department memorandum that concluded that, as commander in chief in time of war, President George W. Bush is bound neither by federal law nor the tenets of the Geneva Conventions that ban torture as a means of extracting information from detainees.

Most Americans will have difficulty believing that this memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and first disclosed by the Wall Street Journal, and others were merely ruminations on the law not meant to guide how prisoners would be treated in Iraq, Afghanistan and at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The March memo asserts that interrogators could inflict severe pain on a detainee with impunity as long as the intent was something other than to torture. An interrogator would be culpable only if he knew his actions would inflict suffering that is severe enough to induce "prolonged" physical or mental effects. An interrogator would be immune from punishment if he believed he acted to prevent a larger harm, the lawyers determined.

The memos were obviously concocted to defend acts that are clearly beyond the bounds of a civilized nation.

Stuart really must be gone for good from here, I guess. His house of cards really is starting to crumble, though. I am still amazed (and amused) at his sheer naivete.

Iraq prison abuse pt. 7 -- the post-G8/Reagan funeral crash

Could a mod lock this one? Thanks.