by H.P. Albarelli Jr. and Jeffrey Kaye
Originally published at Truthout

On Tuesday, February 10, the British High Court finally released a "seven-paragraph court document showing that MI5 officers were involved in the ill-treatment of a British resident, Binyam Mohamed." The document is itself a summary of 42 classified CIA documents given to the British in 2002. The US government has threatened the British government that the US-British intelligence relationship could be damaged if this material were released. The revelations regarding Mohamed's torture, which include documentation of the fact the US conducted "continuous sleep deprivation" under threats of harm, rendition, or being "disappeared," were criticized by the British court as being "at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities," and in violation of the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

The Mohamed case is the most prominent of a number of cases that have come to public attention. While the timeline of Mohamed's torture places the implementation of the Bush administration's so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" many months prior to their questionable legal justification in the August 1, 2002, Jay Bybee memo to the CIA, the use of torture and rendition has a much earlier provenance. Over the past decade, many Americans have been shocked and disturbed about the CIA's secret program of rendition and torture carried out in numerous secret sites (dubbed "black sites" by the CIA) around the globe. The dimensions of this program for the most part are still classified "Eyes Only" in the intelligence community, but the program's roots can be clearly discovered in the early 1950's with the CIA's Artichoke Project. Perhaps the best and strangest case illustrating this can be found in the agency's own files. This is the so-called "Lyle O. Kelly case." The facts of this case are drawn from declassified government documents.

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Happy Monday and welcome to the Dog’s letter writing campaign for torture accountability. For those who have wondered in for the first time, here is how it works; every Monday the Dog writes a letter to the Attorney General or one of the national level decision makers urging them to follow the law of our nation and initiate a full investigation of the acts of torture and the conspiracy to commit torture which the Bush Administration participated in. Your part in this is to either use this letter as starting point for your own or cut and paste the letter over your signature and send it off. The Dog even provides the e-mail addresses; you just provide a very small amount of time and effort.

"Originally posted at Squarestate.net"

This week we will be writing the AG with copies to the President, Speaker of the House, Majority Leader Reid, Judiciary Committee Chairs Conyers and Leahy, Rep. Jerry Nadler, Deputy Attorney General Ogden and Associate Attorney General Perrelli.

Here is the letter:

Dear Attorney General Holder;

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Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-New York) said in a floor statement that the provision to amend the Freedom of Information Act was stripped from an earlier version of the bill, but the language was quietly reinserted in recent weeks, "apparently under direct orders from the administration."

The Obama administration will likely drop its Supreme Court petition challenging the release of photographs showing US soldiers abusing prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan now that lawmakers are set to pass legislation authorizing the government to continue to keep the images under wraps.

On Thursday, the House approved a Department of Homeland Security spending bill that included a provision to amend the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and grant Defense Secretary Robert Gates the authority to withhold "protected documents" that, if released, would endanger the lives of US soldiers or government employees deployed outside of the country.

According to the bill, the phrase "protected documents" refers to photographs taken between September 11, 2001 and January 22, 2009, and involves "the treatment of individuals engaged, captured or detained" in the so-called "war on terror." Photographs that Gates determines would endanger troops and government employees could be withheld for three years.

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A week after the Justice Department released documents that described in extraordinary detail the CIA's top secret rendition program, an international human rights tribunal has agreed to take up the case of a German citizen who was "rendered" to a CIA black site prison in Afghanistan and tortured in a case of mistaken identity.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a petition in April with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IAHCR) on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, a truck driver, detained for four months. El-Masri was first detained in December 2003 in Macedonia by law enforcement authorities of that country for 23 days before being turned over to the CIA.

El-Masri was beaten, stripped and drugged prior to being loaded onto a plane bound for Afghanistan, according to the petition. After several interrogation sessions at the black site prison, the CIA realized they had captured the wrong person. In May 2004, the CIA blindfolded El-Masri, put him on a plane and abandoned him on a hillside in Albania. He was never charged with a crime.

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Among the treasure trove of documents released on Monday related to the CIA's detention and torture program is a 20-page background paper that, for the first time, describes in extraordinary detail the process of "rendition" and the torture prisoners are then subjected to when they are flown to "black site" prisons.

The document was turned over to the ACLU in response to the civil liberties group's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the government late on Monday evening along with numerous others, including previously undisclosed Justice Department legal opinions.

The background paper clearly illustrated that the torture of detainees was systematic and micromanaged by the top officials at the CIA, the Justice Department, medical professionals and, likely, the White House. Previously, the CIA had refused to disclose any details of its rendition program, citing state secrets.

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ACLU video features prominent figures like Oscar-winning director Oliver Stone and a 9/11 family member reading from one of the infamous Bush administration legal memos used to justify the use of torture against detainees in U.S. custody. The video calls for accountability and the restoration of the rule of law.

The video includes appearances by Oliver Stone, 9/11 family member Patricia Perry, actors Rosie Perez, Noah Emmerich, John Doman and Reg E. Cathey, and musical composer Philip Glass, among others, reading directly from a memo authored by Jay Bybee, former head of the Justice Departments Office of Legal Counsel under the Bush administration. The memo was released in April as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU.

For more information, visit:
http://www.aclu.org/torturedlogic (video)
http://www.aclu.org/torture
(Click the "Read more" link to see the poem...

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Faced with impending defeat in a US District Court habeas corpus case, the Obama administration devised a new strategy for continuing the detention of Mohammed Jawad, an Afghani who may have been as young as 12 in 2002 when he allegedly wounded two US soldiers with a grenade.

Justice Department lawyers announced Friday that they would transform Jawad's indefinite detention as an enemy combatant at Guantanamo Bay into a criminal case, thus negating the habeas corpus hearing in Washington, DC, where Judge Ellen Segal Huvelle had accused the government of "dragging [the case] out for no good reason."

Jonathan Hafetz, an attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project and one of Jawad's lawyers, blasted the Obama administration for its "pathetic attempt to prolong an outrageous case and to manipulate the court system.

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In early fall 2003, as the scandal over leaking a covert CIA officer's identity was exploding, President George W. Bush claimed not to know anything about the leak and called on anyone in his administration who had knowledge to come "forward with the information so we can find out whether or not these allegations are true."

How disingenuous the president's appeal was has been underscored again by a new Justice Department court filing sketching out the contents of the 2004 interview between special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Though the Obama administration continues to balk at releasing the full contents of the Cheney interview, it did reveal that Bush and Cheney were in contact about the scandal, including what is described as "a confidential conversation" and "an apparent communication between the Vice President and the President."

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from Sherwood Ross, June 28, 2009

The Central Intelligence Agency crucified a prisoner in Abu Ghraib prison near Baghdad, according to a report published in The New Yorker magazine.

“A forensic examiner found that he (the prisoner) had essentially been crucified; he died from asphyxiation after having been hung by his arms, in a hood, and suffering broken ribs,” the magazine’s Jane Mayer writes in the magazine’s June 22nd issue. “Military pathologists classified the case a homicide.” The date of the murder was not given.

“No criminal charges have ever been brought against any C.I.A. officer involved in the torture program, despite the fact that at least three prisoners interrogated by agency personnel died as a result of mistreatment,” Mayer notes.

An earlier report, by John Hendren in The Los Angeles Times indicted other torture killings. And Human Rights First says nearly 100 detainees have died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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A new report documenting the torture of more than two-dozen former prisoners held at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan between 2002 and 2008 comes several months after a bipartisan Congressional committee linked the murder of two detainees held at the same prison facility to policies enacted by George W. Bush and ex-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

The April report released by the Senate Armed Services Committee on the treatment of prisoners held in US custody in Iraq and Afghanistan concluded that a combination of various torture techniques coupled with a series of brutal beatings administered by military interrogators caused the deaths of the two prisoners in December 2002.

One of the detainees, identified in the report as Dilawar, was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side."

According to the Armed Services Committee report, another detainee identified as Habibullah was killed two days after Rumsfeld authorized the use of "enhanced interrogation" techniques against prisoners in Afghanistan. Dilawar was murdered six days after Habibullah was killed. The report labeled their deaths homicides.

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