Rumsfeld Responsible for Torture, Report Says

WASHINGTON - A bipartisan Senate report released today says that former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials are directly responsible for abuses of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and charges that decisions by those officials led to serious offenses against prisoners in Iraq and elsewhere.

The Senate Armed Services Committee report accuses Rumsfeld and his deputies of being the principal architects of the plan to use harsh interrogation techniques on captured fighters and terrorism suspects, rejecting the Bush administration's contention that the policies originated lower down the command chain.

"The abuse of detainees in U.S. custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of 'a few bad apples' acting on their own," the panel concludes. "The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees."

The report, released by Sens. Carl Levin, D-Mich., and John McCain, R-Ariz., and based on a nearly two-year investigation, said that both the policies and resulting controversies tarnished the reputation of the United States and undermined national security. "Those efforts damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority," it said.

The panel's investigation focused on the Defense Department's use of controversial interrogation practices, including forced nudity, painful stress positions, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and use of dogs. The practices, some of which had already been adopted by the CIA at its secret prisons, were adapted for interrogations at Guantanamo Bay and later migrated to U.S. detention camps in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the infamous Abu Ghraib prison.

"The Committee's report details the inexcusable link between abusive interrogation techniques used by our enemies who ignored the Geneva Conventions and interrogation policy for detainees in U.S. custody," McCain, himself a former prisoner of war in Vietnam, said in a statement. "These policies are wrong and must never be repeated."

White House officials have maintained the measures were approved in response to demands from field officers who complained that traditional interrogation methods weren't working on some of the more hardened captives. But Senate investigators, relying on documents and hours of hearing testimony, arrived at a different conclusion.

The true genesis of the decision to use coercive techniques, the report said, was a memo signed by President Bush on Feb. 7, 2002, declaring that the Geneva Convention's standards for humane treatment did not apply to captured al-Qaida and Taliban fighters. As early as that spring, the panel said, top administration officials, including National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, participated in meetings in which the use of coercive measures was discussed. The panel drew on a written statement by Rice, released earlier this year, to support that conclusion.

In July 2002, Rumseld's senior staff began compiling information about techniques used in military survival schools to simulate conditions that U.S. airmen might face if captured by an enemy that did not follow the Geneva conditions. Those techniques - borrowed from a training program known as Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE - included waterboarding, or simulated drowning, and were loosely based on methods adopted by Chinese communists to coerce propaganda confessions from captured U.S. soldiers during the Korean war.

The SERE program became the template for interrogation methods that were ultimately approved by Rumsfeld himself, the report says. In the field, U.S. military interrogators used the techniques with little oversight and frequently abusive results, the panel found.

"It is particularly troubling that senior officials approved the use of interrogation techniques that were originally designed to simulate abusive tactics used by our enemies against our own soldiersand that were modeled, in part, on tactics used by the Communist Chinese to elicit false confessions from U.S. military personnel," the report said.

Defenders of the techniques have argued that such measures were justified because of al-Qaida's demonstrated disregard for human life. But the panel members cited the views of Gen. David Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, who in a May, 2007 letter to his troops said humane treatment of prisoners allows Americans to occupy the moral high ground.

"Our values and the laws governing warfare teach us to respect human dignity, maintain our integrity, and do what is right," wrote Petraeus, who at the time was the top U.S. commander in Iraq. "Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemy."

Secrets of Iraq's death chamber

Like all wars, the dark, untold stories of the Iraqi conflict drain from its shattered landscape like the filthy waters of the Tigris. And still the revelations come.

The Independent has learnt that secret executions are being carried out in the prisons run by Nouri al-Maliki's "democratic" government.

The hangings are carried out regularly – from a wooden gallows in a small, cramped cell – in Saddam Hussein's old intelligence headquarters at Kazimiyah. There is no public record of these killings in what is now called Baghdad's "high-security detention facility" but most of the victims – there have been hundreds since America introduced "democracy" to Iraq – are said to be insurgents, given the same summary justice they mete out to their own captives.

The secrets of Iraq's death chambers lie mostly hidden from foreign eyes but a few brave Western souls have come forward to tell of this prison horror. The accounts provide only a glimpse into the Iraqi story, at times tantalisingly cut short, at others gloomily predictable. Those who tell it are as depressed as they are filled with hopelessness.

"Most of the executions are of supposed insurgents of one kind or another," a Westerner who has seen the execution chamber at Kazimiyah told me. "But hanging isn't easy." As always, the devil is in the detail.

"There's a cell with a bar below the ceiling with a rope over it and a bench on which the victim stands with his hands tied," a former British official, told me last week. "I've been in the cell, though it was always empty. But not long before I visited, they'd taken this guy there to hang him. They made him stand on the bench, put the rope round his neck and pushed him off. But he jumped on to the floor. He could stand up. So they shortened the length of the rope and got him back on the bench and pushed him off again. It didn't work."

There's nothing new in savage executions in the Middle East – in the Lebanese city of Sidon 10 years ago, a policeman had to hang on to the legs of a condemned man to throttle him after he failed to die on the noose – but in Baghdad, cruel death seems a speciality.

"They started digging into the floor beneath the bench so that the guy would drop far enough to snap his neck," the official said. "They dug up the tiles and the cement underneath. But that didn't work. He could still stand up when they pushed him off the bench. So they just took him to a corner of the cell and shot him in the head."

The condemned prisoners in Kazimiyah, a Shia district of Baghdad, are said to include rapists and murderers as well as insurgents. One prisoner, a Chechen, managed to escape from the jail with another man after a gun was smuggled to them. They shot two guards dead. The authorities had to call in the Americans to help them recapture the two. The Americans killed one and shot the Chechen in the leg. He refused medical assistance so his wound went gangrenous. In the end, the Iraqis had to operate and took all the bones out of his leg. By the time he met one Western visitor to the prison, "he was walking around on crutches with his boneless right leg slung over his shoulder".

In many cases, it seems, the Iraqis neither keep nor release any record of the true names of their captives or of the hanged prisoners. For years the Americans – in charge of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad – did not know the identity of their prisoners. Here, for example, is new testimony given to The Independent by a former Western official to the Anglo-US Iraq Survey Group, which searched for the infamous but mythical weapons of mass destruction: "We would go to the interrogation rooms at Abu Ghraib and ask for a particular prisoner. After about 40 minutes, the Americans brought in this hooded guy, shuffling along, shackled hands and feet.

"They sat him on a chair in front of us and took off his hood. He had a big beard. We asked where he received his education. He repeatedly said 'Mosul'. Then he said he'd left school at 14 – remember, this guy is supposed to be a missile scientist. We said: 'We know you've got a PhD and went to the Sorbonne – we'd like you to help us with information about Saddam's missile project'. But I said to myself : 'This guy doesn't know anything 'bout fucking missiles.' Then it turned out he had a different name from the man we'd asked for, he'd been picked up on the road by the Americans four months earlier, he didn't know why. So we said to the Americans: 'Wrong gentleman!' So they put the shackles on him and took him back to his cell and after 20 or 30 minutes, they'd bring someone else. We'd ask him where he went to school and he told us he had never been to school.

"Wrong person again. It was a complete farce. The incompetence of the US military was astounding, criminal. Eventually, of course, they found the right guy and brought him in and took his hood off. He was breathing heavily, overweight, pudgy, disoriented, a little bit scared."

On this occasion, the Americans had found the right man. The British and American investigators asked the guards to remove the man's shackles, which they did – but then they tied one of the man's legs to the floor. Yes, he had a PhD.

Again, the official's testimony: "We went through his history, what he'd worked on – he was obviously just a minor functionary in one of Saddam's missile programmes. Iraqi scientists didn't have the knowledge how to make nuclear missiles nor did they have the financial support necessary. It just remained in the dreams of Saddam."

The scientist-prisoner in Abu Ghraib miserably told his captors that he'd been arrested by the Americans after they'd knocked on his front door in Baghdad and found two Kalashnikov rifles a woman's hijab, verses from the Koran and, obviously of interest to his captors, "physics and missile textbooks on his bookshelves." But this supposedly valuable prisoner was never charged or previously interviewed even though he admitted he was a rocket scientist.

"I don't know what happened to him," the former official told me. "I tried to tell the UK and the US military that we've arrested this man but that he's got a wife, children, a family. I said that by locking up this one innocent person, you've got 50 men radicalised overnight. No, I don't know what happened to him."

For many of the investigators working for the Anglo-American authorities in Baghdad, the trial for the crime for which the Iraqi dictator was himself subsequently hanged was a fearful experience that ultimately ended in disgust. Through captured documents, they could see the dark, inner workings of Saddam's secret police. The idea of the Saddam trial was less to bring members of the former regime to justice than to show Iraqis how justice and the rule of law should operate.

"It was exhilarating to see Saddam being cross-examined," one of the court investigators said. "The low point was when he was executed. What drove me on was seeing how Saddam dealt with his victims – I was looking at a microcosm of all the deaths that had taken place in Iraq. But when he was executed, it was done in such a savage way."

Saddam Hussein was hanged in the same "secure" unit at Kazimiyah where Mr al-Maliki's people, in an echo of Saddamite Baathist terror, now hang their victims.

Iraq The death penalty

*The death penalty in Iraq was suspended after Saddam Hussein was deposed in 2003. It was reinstated by the interim government in August 2004.

*The United Nations, the European Union and international human rights organisations all spoke out against the reintroduction.

*At the time, the government claimed the death penalty was a necessary measure until the country had stabilised. Amnesty International claims that "the extent of violence in Iraq has increased rather than diminished, clearly indicating that the death penalty has not proved to be an effective deterrent."

*Saddam, left, his half-brother Barzan al-Tikriti and Iraq's former chief judge Awad Hamed al-Bandar were hanged at the end of 2006 for their part in the killings of 148 people in the mainly Shia town of Dujail in 1982. Illicit videos of all three executions later became public. Saddam's body could be seen on a hospital trolley, his head twisted at 90 degrees. Barzan – Iraq's former intelligence chief –was decapitated by the noose. Officials said it was an accident.

*According to Amnesty, there were at least 33 executions reported in Iraq last year. About 200 people were estimated to have been sentenced to death.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/secrets-of-iraqs-death-chamber-953517.html

Black Site Proxy

It started to come back to him. The light, once such a rewarding presence,penetrated through his just opened eyelids and caused immense pain to his half a century old retinas. He managed to squelch a gasp of surprise that bubbled up right before it escaped his throat. His mind was a mess.

"Where am I?" he thought, but no answer could satisfy his inquiry. Vague,broken up shards of memories slowly swarmed through his brain. At that moment, the earth shifted. No, not the Earth, him. He had been roughly lifted up.His vision had crossed the boundary between blindness and blurriness and he could barely make out his feet dragging on a concrete surface. A language he could not make out was being spoken in hushed anger. After what seemed like miles, his body was carelessly deposited into a small room with no light to speak of.

"Where am I? What's going on?" he groggily questioned, but the only response he received was a blow to the head, which sent him reeling back into utter darkness.

He awoke, much later, with a clarity that was absent previously. He tried to make sense of his predicament, but his lack of recollection impaired his ability for coherent thought. The only thing he was sure of was that at sometime he had been in an airplane. He tried to dig into the inner depths of his memory for his name, and after several moments, it came to him. Hassan. His name was Hassan.

A quiet mechanical noise buzzed above his head. It was too dark to know for certain, but the flickering of a red light seemed to be about 10 feet above him.
A camera? Approaching footsteps seemed to confirm this and Hassan was consumed with fear. What now?

The door violently burst open and fluorescent light flooded in immediately, blinding Hassan enough for the source of the footsteps to grab him without struggle and move him to yet another room.

A wooden table and two metal chairs were all that occupied this dimly lit room and Hassan was unceremoniously dumped into one of the chairs. Three men entered the room from a side-door and stood behind him while the one that had transported him seated himself.

Without even hearing them speak, he knew they were American. But what did they want and why was he here?

What followed sent Hassan into a delirious state of hopelessness and mortal terror. In numerous folders provided to the main American through the hours, they implicated him of countless crimes and conspiracies. It didn't matter that Hassan had grown disillusioned with religion as he aged and had not attended the mosque in years. To the Americans, he was an Islamic terrorist bent on the murder of innocents.

Hassan knew he had no way out of this. Deny or confess, he would still be held captive indefinitely and possibly tortured. He had viewed the Arabic language stations and was aware that Muslims were being abducted all over the world.

He thought of his children and grandchildren. Did they know what had happened with him? His status as the local shopkeeper kept his family from utter poverty. Would they be able to survive without his advice and guidance?

The combination of louder threats coming from his captors and the growing panic of his situation made the butterflies in his stomach rise up and attack his chest rabidly until he blacked out once again, this time for good.

A victim of a heart attack.
A victim of extraordinary rendition