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JULY
2008
HEAD OF PSYCHOLOGISTS ASSOCIATION
HELPED CIA WITH TORTURE
Democracy
Now - New information has been revealed about the role psychologists
played in helping the CIA develop its torture techniques. In
her new book The Dark Side, Jane Mayer reveals a former president
of the American Psychological Association, Martin Seligman, was
invited by the CIA in the spring of 2002 to speak at the Navy's
SERE school in San Diego. In the 1960s, Seligman experimented
on dogs and found that by shocking a dog repeatedly and randomly,
he could brutalize it emotionally into a state of complete passivity.
Seligman spoke for three hours about his theory of learned helplessness.
His theories were later adapted for use in CIA prisons. Seligman
is the second APA president to be linked to the CIA's torture
program. Last year, it was revealed former APA president Joseph
Matarazzo is a partner in the Spokane firm Mitchell & Jessen
that was contracted to design the CIA interrogations program.
Unlike other medical associations, the APA has refused to unequivocally
condemn torture.
CORPORATION DEVISES NEW CROWD
TORTURE WEAPON
SECRET RED CROSS REPORT SAYS THE
CIA TORTURED AL QAEDA DETAINEES
Progress
Report -"Red Cross investigators concluded last year in
a secret report that the Central Intelligence Agency's interrogation
methods for high-level al Qaeda prisoners constituted torture,"
according to a new book by investigative reporter Jane Mayer.
The report found that the Bush administration "may have
committed 'grave breaches' of the Geneva Conventions" and
that the officials who approved the methods could be "guilty
of war crimes." The report, which Mayer cited in less detail
last year in the New Yorker, says that al Qaeda member Abu Zubaydah
told the Red Cross "that he had been waterboarded at least
10 times in a single week and as many as three times in a day."
Abu Zubaydah also was confined in a box "so small he said
he had to double up his limbs in the fetal position" and
was "one of several prisoners to be 'slammed against the
walls.'" The Red Cross concluded that the methods used on
Zubaydah were "categorically" torture. In August 2007,
after Mayer's initial New Yorker article on the report was published,
President Bush replied, "[I] haven't seen it; we don't torture"
when asked about the report. But according to Mayer's book, the
CIA showed the report to both Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza
Rice.
JUNE 2008
GITMO INTERROGATORS TOLD TO DESTROY
HANDWRITTEN NOTES
U.S. CHARGED WITH OPERATING FLOATING
PRISONS, CONTINUING RENDITIONS
MAY 2008
FBI DOCUMENTED WIDESPREAD GITMO
WAR CRIMES,
BUT WAS ORDERED TO CLOSE DOWN FILE
THE CIA'S VIEW OF FREEDOM OF INFORMATION
From a CIA
reply to an ACLU FOIA request about waterboarding
FBI DOCUMENTED WIDESPREAD GITMO WAR CRIMES,
BUT WAS ORDER TO CLOSE DOWN FILE
NY TIMES In 2002, as evidence
of prisoner mistreatment at Guantanamo Bay began to mount, Federal
Bureau of Investigation agents at the base created a "war
crimes file" to document accusations against American military
personnel, but were eventually ordered to close down the file,
a Justice Department report revealed Tuesday. . .
In one of several previously
undisclosed episodes, the report found that American military
interrogators appeared to have collaborated with visiting Chinese
officials at Guantanamo Bay to disrupt the sleep of Chinese Muslims
held there, waking them every 15 minutes the night before their
interviews by the Chinese. In another incident, it said, a female
interrogator reportedly bent back an inmate's thumbs and squeezed
his genitals as he grimaced in pain.
The report describes what
one official called "trench warfare" between the F.B.I.
and the military over the rough methods being used on detainees
in Guantanamo Bay, Afghanistan and Iraq.
The report says that the
F.B.I. agents took their concerns to higher-ups, but that their
concerns often fell on deaf ears: officials at senior levels
at the F.B.I., the Justice Department, the Defense Department
and the National Security Council were all made aware of the
F.B.I. agents' complaints, but little appears to have been done
as a result.
The report quotes passionate
objections from F.B.I. officials who grew increasingly concerned
about the reports of practices like intimidating inmates with
snarling dogs, parading them in the nude before female soldiers,
or "short-shackling" them to the floor for many hours
in extreme heat or cold.
Such tactics, said one
F.B.I. agent in an e-mail message to supervisors in November
2002, might violate American law banning torture.
More senior officials,
including Spike Bowman, who was then the head of the national
security law unit at the F.B.I., tried to sound the alarm as
well.
"Beyond any doubt,
what they are doing (and I don't know the extent of it) would
be unlawful were these enemy prisoners of war," Mr. Bowman
wrote in an e-mail message to top F.B.I. officials in July 2003.
APRIL 2008
ABC: TOP BUSH AIDES MET DOZENS OF TIMES TO APPROVE
TORTURE
ABC - In dozens of top-secret
talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration
officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value
al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence
Agency, sources tell ABC News.
The so-called Principals
who participated in the meetings also approved the use of "combined"
interrogation techniques -- using different techniques during
interrogations, instead of using one method at a time -- on terrorist
suspects who proved difficult to break, sources said.
Highly placed sources said
a handful of top advisers signed off on how the CIA would interrogate
top al Qaeda suspects -- whether they would be slapped, pushed,
deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called
waterboarding.
The high-level discussions
about these "enhanced interrogation techniques" were
so detailed, these sources said, some of the interrogation sessions
were almost choreographed -- down to the number of times CIA
agents could use a specific tactic.
The advisers were members
of the National Security Council's Principals Committee, a select
group of senior officials who met frequently to advise President
Bush on issues of national security policy.
At the time, the Principals
Committee included Vice President Cheney, former National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as CIA Director George
Tenet and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
As the national security
adviser, Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White
House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the
principals or their deputies. . .
This is the first time
sources have disclosed that a handful of the most senior advisers
in the White House explicitly approved the details of the program.
According to multiple sources, it was members of the Principals
Committee that not only discussed specific plans and specific
interrogation methods, but approved them. . .
According to a former CIA
official involved in the process, CIA headquarters would receive
cables from operatives in the field asking for authorization
for specific techniques. Agents, worried about overstepping their
boundaries, would await guidance in particularly complicated
cases dealing with high-value detainees, two CIA sources said.
. .
Sources said that at each
discussion, all the Principals present approved.
WHY UC BERKELEY SHOULD FIRE ITS TORTURE
PROFESSOR
TORTURE IS ILLEGAL UNDER U.S. LAW
SCALIA SAYS TORTURE ISN'T PUNISHMENT
TOP
US GENERAL HOODWINKED OVER TORTURE
ACLU UNCOVERS MORE U.S. TORTURE IN AFGHANISTAN
THE
DOMESTIC TORTURE OF SUPERMAX PRISONS
MORE PHOTOS FROM ABU GHRAIB
ATTORNEY GENERAL DOESN'T KNOW WHETHER TORTURE
IS ILLEGAL
U.N. COMMITTEE SAYS TASERS ARE TORTURE
JOINT CHIEFS CHAIR SAYS GITMO PRISON SHOULD
BE CLOSED
CHERTOFF OKAYED TORTURE - INCLUDING WATERBOARDING
- WHILE AT JUSTICE
TUTU: TERROR PRISONS LIKE APARTHEID PRACTICES
HEY KIDS, YOU CAN LEARN HOW TO TORTURE PEOPLE
JUST IN CASE THEY REALLY BAN WATERBOARDING,
HERE'S SOMETHING ELSE TO USE
IS ALAN DERSHOWITZ A CLOSET ANTI-SEMITE?
WANTS US TO USE TORTURE BECAUSE IT WORKED FOR THE NAZIS
FOUR RETIRED JUDGES ADVOCATE GENERAL SAY
WATERBOARDING ALWAYS TORTURE
WATERBOARDING WAS ILLEGAL IN U.S. 60 YEARS
AGO
MARCH 2008
GERMAN DESCRIBES AMERICAN TORTURE IN AFGHNISTAN
CBS - A German resident
held by the U.S. for almost five years tells 60 Minutes correspondent
Scott Pelley that Americans tortured him in many ways - including
hanging him from the ceiling for five days early in his captivity
when he was in Kandahar, Afghanistan. Even after determining
he was not a terrorist, Murat Kurnaz says the torture continued.
Kurnaz tells his story for the first time on American television
this Sunday, March 30, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.
Kurnaz, an ethnic Turk
born and raised in Germany, went to Pakistan in late 2001 at
age 19 to study Islam and wound up in Pakistani police custody.
It was three months after 9/11, and Kurnaz says the U.S. was
offering bounties for suspicious foreigners. Kurnaz says he was
"sold" to the Americans for $3,000 and brought to Kandahar
as terrorist suspect.
He claims American troops
tortured him in Afghanistan by holding his head underwater, administering
electric shocks to the soles of his feet, and hanging him suspended
from the ceiling of an aircraft hangar and kept alive by doctors.
"Every five or six hours they came and pulled me back down
and the doctor came," he recalls. "He looked into my
eyes. He checked my heart and when he said 'okay,' then they
pulled me back up," he tells Pelley.
PSYCHOLOGIST: ABU GHRAIB
WAS DESIGNED FOR TORTURE
AGENCE FRANCE PRESSE -
The very design of Abu Ghraib in Iraq turned good soldiers into
evil tormentors that humiliated and brutalized prisoners, a famed
social psychologist said. Stanford University professor Philip
Zimbardo described a "Lucifer effect" as he flashed
shocking images of Abu Ghraib horrors for those at an elite Technology,
Entertainment and Design conference in California.
"If you give people
power without oversight it is a formula for abuse," Zimbardo
said to a stunned audience the included famous actors, entrepreneurs
and politicians.
"Abu Ghraib abuses
went on for three months ... Who was watching the store? Nobody,
and it was on purpose."
Zimbardo, 75, is renowned
for the 1971 Stanford prison experiment in which students on
summer break play roles as guards or prisoners in a mock prison
in the basement of a building on the university's campus in Northern
California.
The pretend guards grew so sadistic and the prisoners so cowed
that the experiment was halted prematurely out of concern for
the students.
Zimbardo detailed stark
parallels to abuses of suspected terrorists by US soldiers at
Abu Graib prison in Iraq, and how environment can turn people
into heroes or demons.
"I was shocked when
I saw those pictures but I wasn't surprised," Zimbardo said
of the images he was privy to while a member of a legal defense
team for a sergeant charged in connection with prison abuses.
"Because I had seen
those cells before at Stanford. The power is in the system. It's
not bad apples, but bad barrel makers.". . .
"There is an infinite
capacity to make us behave kind or cruel, or make some of us
heroes," Zimbardo said, convinced that environment dictates
the outcome far more than people's characters or personalities.
As a witness for a US military
police reservist that was a guard at the Abu Ghraib interrogation
center when abuses occurred, Zimbardo got access to records and
pictures gathered in the case.
The guards were told to
"soften" prisoners to make them more cooperative with
military intelligence interrogators, according to Zimbardo.
Photos showed naked and
hooded prisoners beaten bloody and being made to commit humiliating
acts such as human pyramids or simulating homosexual sex. Soldiers
posed proudly with battered corpses and nude, injured prisoners.
A picture shows a soldier
firing a bullet into a camel's head at point blank range.
"They took pictures
of everything," Zimbardo said.
http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/node/31428
FEBRUARY 2008
PENTAGON LAWYER WHO
TRIED TO RIG GITMO CASES RESIGNS
THE NATION - William J.
Haynes, the Pentagon's chief legal officer and overseer of Guantanamo's
Military Commissions, is stepping down, amid mounting controversy
over the tribunal process, so he can "return to private
life," the Department of Defense announced late on Monday.
Haynes' resignation comes exactly two weeks after landmark charges
were brought against six "high-value" Guantanamo detainees.
. .
His infamous memos and
public statements advocated torture and the denial of habeas
corpus for detainees. In a 2002 memo, he recommended techniques
such as "twenty-hour interrogations, isolation for up to
thirty days, deprivation of light and auditory stimuli. . . and
stress positions such as the proposed standing for four hours."
In response to this last technique, Haynes's boss at the time,
then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, wrote in the memo's
margins, "I stand 8-10 hours a day. Why is standing limited
to 4 hours." Haynes also wanted to keep death threats, waterboarding
and exposure to extreme temperatures on the table as interrogation
methods. He stated, "Fact: The detainees currently held
at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, are not protected by the Geneva Conventions.".
. .
Criticism of Haynes has
sharpened in the wake of the October resignation of the Chief
Prosecutor of Guantánamo's military commissions, Col.
Morris Davis, who charged that Haynes and other political appointees
were interfering unlawfully in the process. Davis resigned when
Haynes was inserted above him in the chain of command, saying,
"Everyone has opinions, but when he was put above me, his
opinions become orders." . . .
And just last week, Col.
Davis made the startling claim, in an exclusive interview with
The Nation, that Haynes, who oversees both the prosecution and
defense, said to him, "We can't have acquittals, we have
to have convictions." According to Davis, Haynes said, "if
we've been holding these people for so long, how can we explain
letting them get off?"
http://www.thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20080310&s=tuttle2
DECEMBER 2007
BUSH'S FRATBOY APPROACH
TO TORTURE
PAUL KRASSNER - I asked
Sam Leff--given his background as an anthropologist studying
and writing about the hidden rituals of American sadomasochism--for
his take on the CIAs cover-up of torture videos.
"I have been watching
with fascinated horror," he said, as America's S/M patterns
of culture have emerged into the open in the Abu Ghraib/Gitmo
Bush administration. "I've been flashing on some clear images
of the fratboy reality underlying the White House torture tape
controversy."
"Picture this. Bush and Karl Rove sitting around a big plasma
screen (drinking beer?) and laughing their asses off watching
helpless prisoners drowning under a waterboard, or naked getting
cigarette burns, or maybe having analgesic balm applied to their
genitals.
"Once the existence of the tapes became known, their cover
story is that they were having a big discussion about whether
or not to keep or destroy the torture tapes. Like that old pervert,
J. Edgar Hoover, the reality is they were getting off looking
at them as sadistic porn--over and over. Perhaps sharing them
with the frat brothers of their inner circle."
Indeed, in November 2005,
Garry Trudeau was queried by Editor & Publisher about his
Doonesbury strip the previous Sunday which had George Bush defending
the branding of Yale University fraternity initiates with a red-hot
coat-hanger in 1967, and Trudeau replied that it was "totally
fact based. Bush's comment in panel seven is a direct quote."
He was referring to the collegiate Bush saying, "Insignificant!
There's no scarring mark physically or mentally!"
Some pledges told the Yale
Daily News that their branding was preceded by a physical beating.
Said one: "By that time, my body was so numb [from the beatings]
that the iron felt good, like a match was being held close to
my body." Bush, who was president of the fraternity, said
that the resulting wound was only a cigarette burn. Or maybe
enhanced pledging technique.
FIRST PERSON ACCOUNT OF CIA TORTURE
BOING BOING - Salon features
a long first-person account of Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah,
who was kidnapped to a CIA "black site" torture camp.
It's strong and scary stuff, and the people responsible deserve
to be hauled into court, shown up for the criminals they are
and stuck in a cell for the rest of their lives. The traitors
in government who sanctioned this program should join them. Torture
is a cancer. Extrajudicial imprisonment is a cancer. These things
rot democracy. They rot nations.
The CIA held Mohamed Farag
Ahmad Bashmilah in several different cells when he was incarcerated
its network of secret prisons known as "black sites."
But the small cells were all pretty similar, maybe 7 feet wide
and 10 feet long. He was sometimes naked, and sometimes handcuffed
for weeks at a time. In one cell his ankle was chained to a bolt
in the floor. There was a small toilet. In another cell there
was just a bucket. Video cameras recorded his every move. The
lights always stayed on -- there was no day or night. A speaker
blasted him with continuous white noise, or rap music, 24 hours
a day.
The guards wore black masks
and black clothes. They would not utter a word as they extracted
Bashmilah from his cell for interrogation -- one of his few interactions
with other human beings during his entire 19 months of imprisonment.
Nobody told him where he was, or if he would ever be freed.
It was enough to drive
anyone crazy. Bashmilah finally tried to slash his wrists with
a small piece of metal, smearing the words "I am innocent"
in blood on the walls of his cell. But the CIA patched him up.
So Bashmilah stopped eating.
But after his weight dropped to 90 pounds, he was dragged into
an interrogation room, where they rammed a tube down his nose
and into his stomach. Liquid was pumped in. The CIA would not
let him die.
CIA AGENT ADMITS AGENCY TORTURED
PRISONERS WITH WHITE HOUSE APPROVAL
THE LIST: RULES OF
WAR AS OUTLINED IN THE 1949 GENEVA CONVENTIONS
1. Attacks may be made
solely against military targets. Parties to a conflict must distinguish
between civilians and combatants, and civilians may not be attacked.
2. Persons who do not
or can no longer take part in the hostilities are entitled to
respect for their life and for their physical and mental integrity.
3. It is forbidden to
kill or wound an adversary who has surrendered or who can no
longer take part in the fighting.
4. The wounded and sick
must be cared for by the party that holds them. Medical personnel
and facilities, identified by the Red Cross or Red Crescent symbol,
must not be attacked.
5. Prisoners are entitled
to respect for their life, their dignity, their personal rights,
and their beliefs.
6. Torture, cruel or degrading
corporal and other punishment is forbidden.
7. Weapons and methods
of warfare likely to cause unnecessary losses or excessive suffering,
or severe or long-term damage to the environment, may not be
used.
PELOSI TOLD ABOUT CIA'S WATERBOARDING AND DIDN'T
OBJECT
Two senior Republicans and Democrats in
Congress -- including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- were briefed
on the CIA's program to use waterboarding on terror suspects
in September 2002 and did not object, according to Sunday's Washington
Post. . . A Pelosi aide said the Speaker remembered discussion
of "enhanced" interrogation techniques and "acknowledged
that Pelosi did not raise objections at the time."
"In September 2002, four members of
Congress met in secret for a first look at a unique CIA program
designed to wring vital information from reticent terrorism suspects
in U.S. custody," the Post wrote. "For more than an
hour, the bipartisan group, which included current House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), was given a virtual tour of the CIA's
overseas detention sites and the harsh techniques interrogators
had devised to try to make their prisoners talk."
"Among the techniques described, said
two officials present, was waterboarding, a practice that years
later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans
on Capitol Hill," the Post added. "But on that day,
no objections were raised. Instead, at least two lawmakers in
the room asked the CIA to push harder, two U.S. officials said."
NOVEMBER 2007
U.N. TORTURE COMMITTEE SAYS TASERS ARE
TORTURE
AFP - Tasers
- Taser electronic stun guns are a form of torture that can kill,
a UN committee has declared after several recent deaths in North
America. "The use of these weapons causes acute pain, constituting
a form of torture," the UN's Committee against Torture said.
"In certain cases, they can even cause
death, as has been shown by reliable studies and recent real-life
events," the committee of 10 experts said.
Three men, all in their early 20s, were
reported to have died in the United States this week, days after
a Polish man died at Vancouver airport after being Tasered by
Canadian police.
AUGUST 2007
PSYCHOLOGISTS MOVE TO CONDEMN BUSH'S TORTURE PRACTICES
SALON - The American Psychological Association,
the world's largest professional organization of psychologists,
is poised to issue a formal condemnation of a raft of notorious
interrogation tactics employed by U.S. authorities against detainees
during the so-called war on terror, from simulated drowning to
sensory deprivation. The move is expected during the APA's annual
convention in San Francisco this weekend.
The APA's anti-torture resolution follows
a string of revelations in recent months of the key role played
by psychologists in the development of brutal interrogation regimes
for the CIA and the military. And it comes just weeks after news
that the White House may be calling on psychologists once again:
On July 20, President Bush signed an executive order restarting
a coercive CIA interrogation program at the agency's "black
sites." Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell
has indicated that psychological techniques will be part of the
revamped program, but that the interrogations would be subject
to careful medical oversight. That oversight is likely to be
performed by psychologists.
In fact, given what promises to be the
continuing involvement of psychologists in coercive interrogation,
there is intense infighting within the organization about whether
simply condemning abusive tactics is enough. Some of the APA's
148,000 members think the anti-torture resolution put forward
by APA leadership is too weak, and they are putting intense pressure
on the organization's leadership to go a step further and ban
psychologists from participating in detainee interrogations altogether.
They have introduced their own resolution proposing a moratorium.
. .
Whether or not the APA imposes a moratorium
at this weekend's convention, its Council of Representatives
is likely to approve the resolution condemning specific interrogation
techniques. A draft of the resolution obtained by Salon includes
"an absolute prohibition" on psychologists directly
or indirectly participating in interrogations that involve a
list of coercive measures, including, but not limited to, mock
executions; water-boarding; sensory deprivation; "hooding";
forced nudity; sexual humiliation; rape; cultural or religious
humiliation; exploitation of phobias or psychopathology; stress
positions; dogs; physical assault; slapping and shaking; exposure
to extreme heat or cold; induced hypothermia; psychotropic drugs
or mind-altering substances; isolation and sleep deprivation;
threats of harm or death, or threats to members of an individual's
family.
CIA TORTURE TECHNIQUES OUTLINED
WASHINGTON POST -
Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the terrorist
attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, was subjected to the CIA's harshest
interrogation methods while he was held in secret prisons around
the world for more than three years, part of an interrogation
regimen that the International Committee of the Red Cross has
called "tantamount to torture," according to a New
Yorker article published on the magazine's Web site. . .
Unnamed Washington sources told Mayer that
Mohammed said he was held naked in his cell, questioned by female
interrogators to humiliate him, attached to a dog leash and made
to run into walls, and put in painful positions while chained
to the floor. Mohammed also said he was "waterboarded"
-- a simulated drowning -- in addition to being held in suffocating
heat and painfully cold conditions. . . Mohammed's captors also
told him shortly after his arrest in March 2003: "We're
The ICRC report, which was given to CIA
Director Gen. Michael V. Hayden and has had limited distribution
within the administration's highest ranks, details interviews
with the 14 detainees and assesses the CIA program. Sources familiar
with the document have told The Washington Post that the report
shows amazing similarities in terms of how the detainees were
treated even though they were kept isolated from one another.
Sources also have told The Post that the
detainees almost universally told the ICRC that they made up
stories to get the harsh interrogations to stop, possibly leading
U.S. officials astray with bad intelligence. Mohammed confessed
to taking part in 31 of the world's most dramatic terrorist attacks
when he appeared at a Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearing
at Guantanamo, and he presented officers at the hearing with
a document detailing his alleged torture at the hands of the
CIA. That document has been classified.
CIA TORTURE FLIGHT DESCRIBED
DAVID ROSE, OBSERVER
- An Iraqi who was a key source of intelligence for MI5 has given
the first ever full insider's account of being seized by the
CIA and bundled on to an illegal 'torture flight' under the program
known as extraordinary rendition.
In a remarkable interview for The Observer,
British resident Bisher al-Rawi has told how he was betrayed
by the security service despite having helped keep track of Abu
Qatada, the Muslim cleric accused of being Osama bin Laden's
'ambassador in Europe'. He was abducted and stripped naked by
US agents, clad in nappies, a tracksuit and shackles, blindfolded
and forced to wear ear mufflers, then strapped to a stretcher
on board a plane bound for a CIA 'black site' jail near Kabul
in Afghanistan.
Article continues He was taken on to the
jail at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba before being released last March
and returned to Britain after four years' detention without charge.
'All the way through that flight I was
on the verge of screaming,' al-Rawi said. 'At last we landed,
I thought, thank God it's over. But it wasn't - it was just a
refuelling stop in Cairo. There were hours still to go ... My
back was so painful, the handcuffs were so tight. All the time
they kept me on my back. Once, I managed to wriggle a tiny bit,
just shifted my weight to one side. Then I felt someone hit my
hand. Even this was forbidden.'
He was thrown into the CIA's 'Dark Prison,'
deprived of all light 24 hours a day in temperatures so low that
ice formed on his food and water. He was taken to Guantanamo
in March 2003 and released after being cleared of any involvement
in terrorism by a tribunal.
A report by Parliament's intelligence and
security committee last week disclosed that, although the Americans
warned MI5 it planned to render al-Rawi in advance, in breach
of international law, the British did not intervene on the grounds
he did not have a UK passport. The government claimed he was
the responsibility of Iraq, which he fled as a teenager when
his father was tortured by Saddam Hussein's regime.
The report confirmed that al-Rawi, 39,
was only held after MI5 sent the CIA a telegram, stating he was
an 'Islamic extremist' who had a timer for an improvised bomb
in his luggage. In reality, before al-Rawi left London, police
confirmed the device was a battery charger from Argos.
The committee accepted MI5's claim, given
in secret testimony, that it had not wanted the Americans to
arrest him, in November 2002, concluding the incident had damaged
US-UK relations.
CIA WHISTLEBLOWERS HELPED UNCOVER AGENCY'S TORTURE
PROGRAM
SUZANNE GOLDENBERG, GUARDIAN - American
intelligence officials who were deeply opposed to the secret
transfer of terror suspects to interrogation centers across Europe
cooperated with an investigation into the CIA's undisclosed network
of jails, it was claimed. Dick Marty, the Swiss senator who produced
the Council of Europe's report on the hidden transport and detention
of suspects, yesterday told a committee in the European parliament
that he had received information about the secret program from
dissident officers within the upper reaches of the CIA. He said
the officers were disturbed that the program, known as renditions,
led to the torture and mistreatment of detainees.
Article continues "Many leading figures
in the CIA did not accept these methods at all," Mr Marty
told a committee meeting yesterday. He said senior agency officials
had agreed to help his investigation in return for anonymity.
"People in the CIA felt these things were not consonant
with the sort of intelligence work they normally do," he
said. . .
Three former CIA officers yesterday told
the Guardian that Mr Marty was correct about the deep divisions
within the CIA. However, one former officer, Vincent Cannistraro,
said he doubted Mr Marty would have met serving officials.
But the depths of anger within the CIA
remained real. "There are people who decided to take early
retirement," said Mr Cannistraro. "There were a couple
of . . . relatively senior officials whose upward career was
blocked because of their lack of wholehearted endorsement of
the programme."
OCTOBER 2007
JUSTICE DEPARTMENT STILL DEFENDING TASERS DESPITE
TORTURE AND 277 U.S. DEATHS SINCE 2001
REUTERS - Researchers tracked police Taser use on 962 people
in six jurisdictions around the country from July 2005 to June
of this year. The study was funded by the U.S. Justice Department.
Three of these people sustained moderate or severe nonfatal injuries
requiring hospital admission, the study found. Two of them had
head injuries suffered when they fell to the ground after being
stunned. One had a type of muscle breakdown condition also seen
in people whose body temperature gets too high, the researchers
said. Of the rest, 216 people sustained mild injuries like abrasions,
contusions and minor cuts requiring outpatient medical treatment,
and 743 suffered no injury, the study found. Two who were shocked
with the weapon died, but the researchers said investigations
and autopsies determined the deaths to have been unrelated to
the Taser. . .
Jared Feuer, who heads the U.S. southern regional office of Amnesty
International, said the group has documented that 277 people
in the United States have died after being shocked by a Taser
since June 2001. "We do believe that there is a risk to
the public safety, and we still call for there to be a moratorium
on the use of Tasers" by police, Feuer said in an telephone
interview.
"Our concern is that Tasers interfere with a basic equation,
which is that force must always be proportional to the threat,"
Feuer said, noting that about 80 percent of the people on whom
a Taser is used by U.S. police are unarmed.
JUNE 2007
U.S. USING ETHIOPIA AS TORTURE CENTER
SPIEGEL, GERMANY - Terror suspects have
been questioned by US officials in Ethiopia after being transferred
from Somalia and Kenya. The captives included Europeans who were
detained, interrogated and then released without charge. . .
Swedish citizen Munir Awad, 25, who was
only released three weeks ago, told Der Spiegel that he had travelled
with his 17-year-old girlfriend Safia Benaouda, also a Swedish
citizen, to Mogadishu in December. He says that after the Ethiopian
troops invaded they fled to Kenya, where they were arrested by
local militia and US soldiers and sent to the Ethiopian capital
Addis Ababa.
Awad claims that they were held on a military
base and interrogated, sometimes for 12 hours at a time or longer,
and were not given access to a lawyer. He says that they were
accused by the Americans of being al-Qaida fighters. DNA samples
were taken and they were questioned about Swedish Muslims. He
says they were sometimes beaten or choked and only those who
cooperated were allowed to sit or were given something to eat.
In a related case, the Sunday Times of
London reported on Sunday that the 25-year-old British student
Reza Afsharzadagen, who was among refugees forced to flee the
battles in Somalia in December, was also arrested as a suspected
al-Qaida member in Kenya and sent back to Somalia. He said he
was handed over to Ethiopian soldiers but a British diplomat
intervened and took him home. According to the newspaper, flight
records show that 85 other prisoners were transferred to Ethiopia
for interrogation, and that these included 11 women and 11 children.
. .
The US government is apparently making
sure that it is the Ethiopian authorities rather than US officials
who are running the prisons in Addis Ababa. "They've concealed
their role but you can assume the Americans were behind all these
renditions," a senior western diplomat based in Kenya told
the Sunday Times. "By sending prisoners to Ethiopia, they
had a convenient place to interrogate people."
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,487893,00.html
NUREMBERG PROSECUTOR SAYS HE'S AGHAST
AT GUANTANAMO
JANE SUTTON, REUTERS - The U.S. war crimes
tribunals at Guantanamo have betrayed the principles of fairness
that made the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg a judicial
landmark, one of the U.S. Nuremberg prosecutors said on Monday.
"I think Robert Jackson, who's the
architect of Nuremberg, would turn over in his grave if he knew
what was going on at Guantanamo," Nuremberg prosecutor Henry
King Jr. told Reuters in a telephone interview.
"It violates the Nuremberg principles,
what they're doing, as well as the spirit of the Geneva Conventions
of 1949.". . .
King, who interrogated Nuremberg defendant
Albert Speer, was incredulous that the Guantanamo rules left
open the possibility of using evidence obtained through coercion.
. .
He said the Guantanamo prisoners should
be tried in the court-martial system or the U.S. federal courts,
under fair rules that leave open the possibility of acquittal.
Three Nuremberg defendants were acquitted, King noted.
http://www.unknownnews.org/070611-Nuremberg.html
MAY 2007
STRONG SUPPORT FOR TORTURE, ROUGH TREATMENT
OF NON COMBATANTS AMONG U.S. TROOPS
AL JAZEERA - Almost
one in ten US combat troops deployed in Iraq have mistreated
a civilian, according to a new survey conducted by an army mental
health advisory team. The survey, released on Friday, also found
that less than half of the soldiers and marines surveyed would
report a fellow serviceman for killing or injuring an innocent
Iraqi. . .
The 89-page report found that the US troops
surveyed had on average:
Insulted or cursed at non-combatants in
their presence: Marines - 30% Soldiers - 28%
Damaged or destroyed Iraqi property when
it was not necessary: Marines - 12% Soldiers - 9%
Physically hit or kicked non-combatants
when it was not necessary: Marines - 7% Soldiers - 4%
More than a third of the 1,320 soldiers
and 447 marines surveyed said that torture should be allowed
to save the life of a fellow soldier or marine, while almost
38 per cent said torture should be allowed in order to gather
"important information about insurgents".
The survey showed only 47 per cent of soldiers
and 38 per cent of marines agreed that non-combatants should
be treated with dignity and respect.
Overall, about 20 per cent of army soldiers
and 15 per cent of marines showed mental health symptoms of either
anxiety, depression or acute stress.
INTEL OFFICERS REVEAL TORTURE TECHNIQUES
TO ABC NEWS
BRIAN ROSS + RICHARD ESPOSITO, ABC NEWS
- Harsh interrogation techniques authorized by top officials
of the CIA have led to questionable confessions and the death
of a detainee since the techniques were first authorized in mid-March
2002, ABC News has been told by former and current intelligence
officers and supervisors.
They say they are revealing specific details
of the techniques, and their impact on confessions, because the
public needs to know the direction their agency has chosen. All
gave their accounts on the condition that their names and identities
not be revealed. Portions of their accounts are corrobrated by
public statements of former CIA officers and by reports recently
published that cite a classified CIA Inspector General's report.
. .
The CIA sources described a list of six
"Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" instituted in mid-March
2002 and used, they said, on a dozen top al Qaeda targets incarcerated
in isolation at secret locations on military bases in regions
from Asia to Eastern Europe. According to the sources, only a
handful of CIA interrogators are trained and authorized to use
the techniques:
1. The Attention Grab: The interrogator
forcefully grabs the shirt front of the prisoner and shakes him.
2. Attention Slap: An open-handed slap
aimed at causing pain and triggering fear.
3. The Belly Slap: A hard open-handed slap
to the stomach. The aim is to cause pain, but not internal injury.
Doctors consulted advised against using a punch, which could
cause lasting internal damage.
4. Long Time Standing: This technique is
described as among the most effective. Prisoners are forced to
stand, handcuffed and with their feet shackled to an eye bolt
in the floor for more than 40 hours. Exhaustion and sleep deprivation
are effective in yielding confessions.
5. The Cold Cell: The prisoner is left
to stand naked in a cell kept near 50 degrees. Throughout the
time in the cell the prisoner is doused with cold water.
6. Water Boarding: The prisoner is bound
to an inclined board, feet raised and head slightly below the
feet. Cellophane is wrapped over the prisoner's face and water
is poured over him. Unavoidably, the gag reflex kicks in and
a terrifying fear of drowning leads to almost instant pleas to
bring the treatment to a halt.
http://abcnews.go.com/WNT/print?id=1322866
APRIL 2007
CIA & FBI USING ETHIOPIAN
TORTURE PRISONS AS OUTSOURCED GITMO
MSNBC - CIA and FBI agents hunting
for al-Qaida militants in the Horn of Africa have been interrogating
terrorism suspects from 19 countries held at secret prisons in
Ethiopia, which is notorious for torture and abuse, according
to an investigation by The Associated Press. Human rights groups,
lawyers and several Western diplomats assert hundreds of prisoners,
who include women and children, have been transferred secretly
and illegally in recent months from Kenya and Somalia to Ethiopia,
where they are kept without charge or access to lawyers and families.
The detainees include at least one U.S. citizen, and some are
from Canada, Sweden and France, according to a list compiled
by a Kenyan Muslim rights group and flight manifests obtained
by AP. . .
John Sifton, a Human Rights Watch
expert on counter-terrorism, went further. He said in an e-mail
that the United States has acted as "ringleader" in
what he labeled a "decentralized, outsourced Guantanamo."
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17935971/
MARCH 2007
ALL FORMS OF TORTURE CAUSE SIMILAR RESULTS
ALAN ZAREMBO, LA TIMES
- Degrading treatment and psychological manipulation cause as
much emotional suffering and long-term mental damage as physical
torture, researchers reported. Psychiatric evaluations of 279
victims of torture and other abuses from the Balkan wars of the
1990s showed that both types of ill treatment led to similarly
high rates of depression and post-traumatic stress disorder.
The victims themselves rated the psychological tactics on par
with the physical abuses they suffered. . . The study shows that
"there is no such thing as 'Torture Lite,' " said Dr.
Steven Miles of the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics,
who was not involved in the research
JANUARY 2007
PENTAGON SAYS IT WAS OKAY TO TORTURE
BEFORE NEW YEAR'S 2006
CNN - Defense Secretary Robert Gates is submitting to Congress
a manual for trials of detainees being held at Guantanamo Bay
that would allow the admission of hearsay evidence and coerced
testimony, a Pentagon official told reporters Thursday. The manual
was drafted to comply with a law passed last year that restored
the Bush administration's military commissions created to try
terrorist suspects. . . The procedures outlined in the manual
"will ensure that unlawful enemy combatants suspected of
war crimes and certain other offenses are prosecuted before regularly
constituted courts affording all the judicial guarantees which
are recognized as indispensable by civilized people," said
Principal Deputy General Counsel Dan Dell'Orto. . . Dell'Orto
said the manual calls for the accused to be presumed innocent
and requires that convictions be based on guilt proven beyond
a reasonable doubt.. . . The statute provides for the admissibility
of hearsay evidence. . . Brig. Gen. Thomas Hemingway, a legal
adviser to the Office of Military Commissions, told reporters
that the manual provides for a "clear prohibition of evidence
obtained by torture" if it was obtained after December 30,
2005.
http://www.cnn.com/2007/LAW/01/18/detainee.trials/index.html
MORE GITMO CRUELTY REVEALED BY FBI
[The Washington buried this story
in its business section]
DAN EGGEN, WASHINGTON POST - FBI agents witnessed possible mistreatment
of the Koran at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,
including at least one instance in which an interrogator squatted
over Islam's holy text in an apparent attempt to offend a captive,
according to bureau documents released yesterday. . .
In another incident that month,
interrogators wrapped a bearded prisoner's head in duct tape
"because he would not stop quoting the Koran," according
to an FBI agent, the documents show. The agent, whose account
was corroborated by a colleague, said that a civilian contractor
laughed about the treatment and was eager to show it off.
The new documents were turned
over as part of an ongoing lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties
Union. In them, FBI employees said they had witnessed 26 incidents
of possible mistreatment of detainees at Guantanamo Bay, including
previously reported cases in which prisoners were shackled to
the floor for extended periods of time or subjected to sexually
suggestive tactics by female interrogators.
In a previously unreported allegation,
one interrogator bragged to an FBI agent that he had forced a
prisoner to listen to "Satanic black metal music for hours,"
then dressed as a Catholic priest before "baptizing"
him.
DECEMBER 2006
THE AMERICAN WAY OF TORTURE
GEORGE MONBIOT, GUARDIAN, UK
- In early December, defense lawyers acting for Jose Padilla,
a US citizen detained as an "enemy combatant," released
a video showing a mission fraught with deadly risk -- taking
him to the prison dentist. A group of masked guards in riot gear
shackled his legs and hands, blindfolded him with black-out goggles
and shut off his hearing with headphones, then marched him down
the prison corridor.
Is Padilla really that dangerous?
Far from it: his warders describe him as so docile and inactive
that he could be mistaken for "a piece of furniture."
The purpose of these measures appeared to be to sustain the regime
under which he had lived for over three years: total sensory
deprivation. He had been kept in a blacked-out cell, unable to
see or hear anything beyond it. Most importantly, he had no human
contact, except for being bounced off the walls from time to
time by his interrogators. As a result, he appears to have lost
his mind. I don't mean this metaphorically. I mean that his mind
is no longer there. . .
That the US tortures, routinely
and systematically, while prosecuting its "war on terror"
can no longer be seriously disputed. The Detainee Abuse and Accountability
Project, a coalition of academics and human rights groups, has
documented the abuse or killing of 460 inmates of US military
prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq and at Guantanamo Bay. This, it
says, is necessarily a conservative figure: many cases will remain
unrecorded. The prisoners were beaten, raped, forced to abuse
themselves, forced to maintain "stress positions,"
and subjected to prolonged sleep deprivation and mock executions.
The New York Times reports that
prisoners held by the US military at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan
were made to stand for up to 13 days with their hands chained
to the ceiling, naked, hooded and unable to sleep. The Washington
Post alleges that prisoners at the same airbase were "commonly
blindfolded and thrown into walls, bound in painful positions,
subjected to loud noises and deprived of sleep" while kept,
like Jose Padilla and the arrivals at Guantanamo Bay, "in
black hoods or spray-painted goggles.". . .
Padilla's treatment also reflects
another glorious American tradition: solitary confinement. Some
25,000 US prisoners are currently held in isolation -- a punishment
only rarely used in other democracies. In some places, like the
federal prison in Florence, Colorado, they are kept in sound-proofed
cells and might scarcely see another human being for years on
end. They may touch or be touched by no one. Some people have
been kept in solitary confinement in the United States for more
than 20 years.
At Pelican Bay in California,
where 1,200 people are held in the isolation wing, inmates are
confined to tiny cells for 22-and-a half hours a day, then released
into an "exercise yard" for "recreation."
The yard consists of a concrete well about 12 feet in length
with walls 20 feet high and a metal grill across the sky. The
recreation consists of pacing back and forth, alone. . . As National
Public Radio reveals, 10% of the isolation prisoners at Pelican
Bay are now in the psychiatric wing, and there's a waiting list.
. .
President Bush maintains that
he is fighting a war against threats to the "values of civilized
nations": terror, cruelty, barbarism and extremism. He asked
his nation's interrogators to discover where these evils are
hidden. They should congratulate themselves. They appear to have
succeeded.
http://www.alternet.org/rights/45613/
MILITARY SUBJECTED PADILLA TO SENSORY
TORTURE
UPI - Newly released photographs
of U.S. terror suspect Jose Padilla wearing sensory deprivation
devices have outraged a Washington military expert. The photos
came from a Defense Department video of Padilla, 36, being escorted
from his cell at a South Carolina brig where he was held for
3 1/2 years without being charged. He is shown wearing noise-blocking
headphones and blacked-out goggles, the New York Daily News reported
Tuesday. Eugene Fidell, president of the National Institute of
Military Justice, told the newspaper he found the images "extremely
disturbing" and called it "outrageous government conduct."
Mary Ellen O'Connell, a torture expert at Notre Dame Law School,
agreed. "It looked extraordinarily excessive," O'Connell
said. "He's only a suspect -- he hasn't been convicted of
anything." The New York-born Padilla, a convert to Islam,
was declared an "enemy combatant" after he was arrested
in 2002 and prosecutors alleged he was conspiring to detonate
a radioactive "dirty bomb" in a U.S. city. When he
was eventually charged in 2005 with conspiring in a minor terrorism
case but there was no mention of a dirty bomb in the indictment,
the newspaper said.
http://insider.washingtontimes.com/articles/view_upi.php?StoryID=20061205-093601-4853r
CIA HAS BEEN DOING THIS FOR FIFTY YEARS
http://hnn.us/articles/32497.html
U.S. FORCES TORTURE ONE THEIR OWN
MICHAEL MOSS, NY TIMES - One night in mid-April, the steel door
clanked shut on detainee No. 200343 at Camp Cropper, the United
States military's maximum-security detention site in Baghdad.
American guards arrived at the man's cell periodically over the
next several days, shackled his hands and feet, blindfolded him
and took him to a padded room for interrogation, the detainee
said. After an hour or two, he was returned to his cell, fatigued
but unable to sleep.
The fluorescent lights in his
cell were never turned off, he said. At most hours, heavy metal
or country music blared in the corridor. He said he was rousted
at random times without explanation and made to stand in his
cell. Even lying down, he said, he was kept from covering his
face to block out the light, noise and cold. And when he was
released after 97 days he was exhausted, depressed and scared.
Detainee 200343 was among thousands
of people who have been held and released by the American military
in Iraq, and his account of his ordeal has provided one of the
few detailed views of the Pentagon's detention operations since
the abuse scandals at Abu Ghraib. Yet in many respects his case
is unusual.
The detainee was Donald Vance,
a 29-year-old Navy veteran from Chicago who went to Iraq as a
security contractor. He wound up as a whistle-blower, passing
information to the F.B.I. about suspicious activities at the
Iraqi security firm where he worked, including what he said was
possible illegal weapons trading.
But when American soldiers raided
the company at his urging, Mr. Vance and another American who
worked there were detained as suspects by the military, which
was unaware that Mr. Vance was an informer, according to officials
and military documents. . .
NOVEMBER 2006
FIFTY YEARS OF CIA TORTURE
ALFRED W. MCCOY, HISTORY NEWS
NETWORK - From 1950 to 1962, the CIA led a secret research effort
to crack the code of human consciousness, a veritable Manhattan
project of the mind with costs that reached a billion dollars
a year. Many have heard about the most outlandish and least successful
aspect of this research -- the testing of LSD on unsuspecting
subjects and the tragic death of a CIA employee, Dr. Frank Olson,
who jumped to his death from a New York hotel after a dose of
this drug. This Agency drug testing, the focus of countless sensational
press accounts and a half-dozen major books, led nowhere.
But obscure CIA-funded behavioral
experiments, outsourced to the country's leading universities,
produced two key findings, both duly and dully reported in scientific
journals, that contributed to the discovery of a distinctly American
form of torture: psychological torture. With funding from Canada's
Defense Research Board, famed Canadian psychologist Dr. Donald
O. Hebb found that he could induce a state akin to psychosis
in just 48 hours. What had the doctor done-drugs, hypnosis, electroshock?
No, none of the above.
For two days, student volunteers
at McGill University, where Dr. Hebb was chair of Psychology,
simply sat in comfortable cubicles deprived of sensory stimulation
by goggles, gloves, and ear muffs. . .
Dr. Hebb himself reported that
after just two to three days of such isolation "the subject's
very identity had begun to disintegrate." If you compare
a drawing of Dr. Hebb's student volunteers published in "Scientific
American" with later photos of Guantanamo detainees, the
similarity is, for good reason, striking.
During the 1950s as well, two
eminent neurologists at Cornell Medical Center working for the
CIA found that the KGB's most devastating torture technique involved,
not crude physical beatings, but simply forcing the victim to
stand for days at time-while the legs swelled, the skin erupted
in suppurating lesions, the kidneys shut down, hallucinations
began. . .If you look at those hundreds of photos from Abu Ghraib
you will see repeated use of this method, now called "stress
positions."
After codification in its 1963
KUBARK manual, the CIA spent the next thirty years propagating
these torture techniques within the US intelligence community
and among anti-communist allies across Asia and Latin America.
Although the Agency trained military
interrogators from across Latin America, our knowledge of the
actual torture techniques comes from a single handbook for a
Honduran training session, the CIA's "Human Resources Exploitation
Manual - 1983." To establish control at the outset the questioner
should, the CIA instructor tells his Honduran trainees, "manipulate
the subject's environment, to create unpleasant or intolerable
situations, to disrupt patterns of time, space, and sensory perception."
To effect this psychological disruption, this 1983 handbook specified
techniques that seem strikingly similar to those outlined 20
years earlier in the Kubark Manual and those that would be used
20 years later at Abu Ghraib.
When the Cold War came to a close,
Washington resumed its advocacy of human rights, ratifying the
UN Convention Against Torture in 1994 that banned the infliction
of "severe" psychological and physical pain. On the
surface, the United States had apparently resolved the tension
between its anti-torture principles and its torture practices.
Yet when President William Clinton
sent this UN Convention to Congress for ratification in 1994,
he included language drafted six years earlier by the Reagan
administration-with four detailed diplomatic "reservations"
focused on just one word in the convention's 26-printed pages.
That word was "mental."
Significantly, these intricately-constructed
diplomatic reservations re-defined torture, as interpreted by
the United States, to exclude sensory deprivation and self-inflicted
pain-the very techniques the CIA had refined at such great cost.
Of equal import, this definition was reproduced verbatim in domestic
legislation enacted to give legal force to the UN Convention.
. .
In effect, Washington had split
the UN Convention down the middle, banning physical torture but
exempting psychological abuse. . .
[Mr. McCoy is teaches history
at the University of Wisconsin and is the author of A Question
of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on
Terror]
http://hnn.us/articles/32497.html
MOST EUROPEAN COUNTRIES KNEW ABOUT CIA
TORTURE FLIGHTS
EU BUSINESS - Most EU member
nations knew about the US policy of CIA seizures of terror suspects
abroad and kept the information from a European parliamentary
enquiry, the committee's rapporteur Claudio Fava said. "Many
governments cooperated passively or actively (with the CIA).
They knew," said Fava, presenting the committee's final
report on the Central Intelligence Agency's alleged use of European
countries for the illegal transport and detention of prisoners.
He denounced "the very great reticence from almost all the
member states (with the exception of Germany and Spain) to cooperate,"
with the investigation.
He named 12 EU nations as being involved -- Austria, Britain,
Cyprus, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Poland, Portugal,
Spain, Sweden -- along with Romania, which will join the bloc
in January, and non-EU nations Bosnia, Macedonia and Turkey.
. .
Fava also cited the cases of
at least 1,245 CIA-run flights landing in Europe, most of them
logistical flights but some which probably served to transport
prisoners. . . Fava offered little in the way of conclusions,
simply inviting the EU authorities to "accept their responsibilities"
to deal with the offending member states. . .
The final report added little
to a preliminary report released in July, and maintained its
main presumptions. On the existence of secret detention centers
it did "not exclude the possibility that the American secret
services were operating at a secret base in Romania". There
could have been another detention centre in northeastern Poland,
near the Szymany airport.
http://www.eubusiness.com/afp/061128172102.6asrx8ct
U.S. ONCE CONSIDERED WATER-BOARDING A WAR CRIME
UPI - The [Washington] Post reported
that in 1947, the United States charged a Japanese officer, with
war crimes for carrying out a form of water-boarding on a U.S.
civilian, and according to U.S. Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass.,
the officer was sentenced to 15 years of hard labor. . . The
Post said Central Intelligence Agency officials believe water-boarding
technique helped draw information from Sept. 11, 2001, terror
attack mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed. The report also quoted
a former intelligence officer as saying not all the information
was reliable. In the current war against Taliban, al-Qaida and
other terrorists, the technique was cleared not only by the White
House but by the U.S. Justice Department.
BUSH NOT ONLY CLAIMS RIGHT TO TORTURE
BUT RIGHT TO HIDE THAT IT HAPPENED
CAROL D. LEONNIG AND ERIC RICH, WASHINGTON
POST - The Bush administration has told a federal judge that
terrorism suspects held in secret CIA prisons should not be allowed
to reveal details of the "alternative interrogation methods"
that their captors used to get them to talk.
The government says in new court filings
that those interrogation methods are now among the nation's most
sensitive national security secrets and that their release --
even to the detainees' own attorneys -- "could reasonably
be expected to cause extremely grave damage." Terrorists
could use the information to train in counter-interrogation techniques
and foil government efforts to elicit information about their
methods and plots, according to government documents submitted
to U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton on Oct. 26. . .
Joseph Margulies, a Northwestern University
law professor who has represented several detainees at Guantanamo,
said the prisoners "can't even say what our government did
to these guys to elicit the statements that are the basis for
them being held. Kafkaesque doesn't do it justice. This is 'Alice
in Wonderland.'"
http://tinyurl.com/unr4s
INDIA, RUSSIA, ISRAEL MOST BARBARIC
ON TORTURE;
AUSTRALIA, FRANCE, ITALY MOST CIVILIZED
BBC - Nearly a third of people
worldwide back the use of torture in prisons in some circumstances,
a BBC survey suggests. Although 59% were opposed to torture,
29% thought it acceptable to use some degree of torture to combat
terrorism. While most polled in the US are against torture, opposition
there is less robust than in Europe and elsewhere. More than
27,000 people in 25 countries were asked if torture would be
acceptable if it could provide information to save innocent lives.
Some 36% of those questioned in the US agreed that this use of
torture was acceptable, while 58% were unwilling to compromise
on human rights.
TABLE: COUNTRIES AND TORTURE
http://prorev.com/torture.htm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/in_depth/6063386.stm
TORTURE FLIGHTS STOPPED IN ISRAEL
YOSSI MELMAN, HAARETZ - The Israel Airports Authority has confirmed
that planes known to have been used by the CIA to transport suspects
to detention and interrogation facilities stopped at Ben-Gurion
International Airport in Tel Aviv. According to the British civil
liberties organization Statewatch, at least four flights through
Tel Aviv occurred between 2003 and 2004. . . There is no known
American-Israeli interrogation facility on Israeli soil, although
it is known that the Israeli and American intelligence organizations
share information about the arrests and interrogation of Hezbollah,
Hamas and Islamic Jihad terror suspects.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/781889.html
OCTOBER 2006
HILLARY CLINTON SAYS SOME TORTURE ACCEPTABLE
BEN SMITH, NY DAILY NEWS - Despite
her apparent opposition to torture, Hillary Clinton said in a
Daily News editorial board meeting yesterday that the practice
is acceptable in some circumstances. Clinton got a rousing reception
from the human rights community, and seemed to take an uncharacteristically
bright-line stance, in a recent statement on the Senate floor
during the debate over torture.
"Have we fallen so low as
to debate how much torture we are willing to stomach?" she
asked at one point, and left anti-torture commentators, and even
Clinton critics like Andrew Sullivan, with the impression that
she'd emerged into a kind of un-Clintonian moral clarity and
said no to torture.
But at yesterday's Daily News
editorial board meeting, it emerged that she's not actually against
torture in all instances, and that her dispute with McCain and
Bush is largely procedural.
She was asked about the "ticking
time bomb" scenario, in which you've captured the terrorist
and don't have time for a normal interrogation, and said that
there is a place for what she called "severity," in
a conversation that included mentioning water-boarding, hypothermia,
and other techniques commonly described as torture.
"I have said that those
are very rare but if they occur there has to be some lawful authority
for pursuing that," she responded. "Again, I think
the President has to take responsibility. There has to be some
check and balance, some reporting. I don't mind if it's reporting
in a top secret context. But that shouldn't be the tail that
wags the dog, that should be the exception to the rule."
Asked again about these methods,
she said:
"In those instances where
we have sufficient basis to believe that there is something imminent,
yeah, but then we've got to have a check and balance."
So I'm not sure what Andrew Sullivan
is so excited about. Torture is OK as long as the president approves
it, as long as it's an exception, and as long as it's secretly
reported to Congress. That doesn't sound like a bright moral
line to me.
http://blogs.nydailynews.com/dailypolitics/archives/2006/10/clinton_on_tort.php/
CHENEY SUPPORTS WATER-BOARDING, THEN
LIES ABOUT IT
[We especially like the part
where the Post goes to "legal experts" to find out
what the English language means. There was a time when reporters
thought they knew more about that topic than lawyers]
DAN EGGEN WASHINGTON POST - Vice
President Cheney said yesterday that he was not referring to
an interrogation technique known as "water-boarding"
when he told an interviewer this week that dunking terrorism
suspects in water was a "no-brainer." Cheney told reporters
aboard Air Force Two last night that he did not talk about any
specific interrogation technique during his interview Tuesday
with a conservative radio host.
"I didn't say anything about
water-boarding. . . . He didn't even use that phrase," Cheney
said on a flight to Washington from South Carolina.
Earlier in the day, White House
press secretary Tony Snow told reporters that the vice president
was talking literally about "a dunk in the water,"
though neither Snow nor Cheney explained what that meant or whether
such a tactic had been used against U.S. detainees. "A dunk
in the water is a dunk in the water," Snow said. . .
Many legal experts said it was
reasonable to conclude that Cheney was referring to water-boarding,
since it has been a widely debated U.S. interrogation technique
that uses water to subject a suspect to the fear of drowning.
. .
Some lawmakers have said that
they believe water-boarding is illegal under detainee legislation
approved last month, but the Bush administration has declined
to say what techniques it considers off-limits. . .
Human rights and legal experts
said yesterday that even if Snow's version of Cheney's remarks
is correct, Cheney's comments are troubling because dunking a
terrorism suspect in water as part of an interrogation would
actually be more physically dangerous than water-boarding. The
tactic also would be illegal under U.S. and international laws,
they said.
Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy
director for Human Rights Watch, noted that in the 1980s, Chadian
forces led by military ruler Hissene Habre allegedly hung people
upside down and dunked them in water during questioning. Habre
was indicted by a Belgian court for torture and crimes against
humanity and faces prosecution in Senegal.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/10/27/AR2006102700560_pf.html
 Left: From a new BBC
poll showing percentage in each country opposing all torture.
INDIA, RUSSIA, ISRAEL MOST BARBARIC
ON TORTURE; AUSTRALIA, FRANCE, ITALY MOST CIVILIZED
BBC - Nearly a third of people
worldwide back the use of torture in prisons in some circumstances,
a BBC survey suggests. Although 59% were opposed to torture,
29% thought it acceptable to use some degree of torture to combat
terrorism. While most polled in the US are against torture, opposition
there is less robust than in Europe and elsewhere. More than
27,000 people in 25 countries were asked if torture would be
acceptable if it could provide information to save innocent lives.
Some 36% of those questioned in the US agreed that this use of
torture was acceptable, while 58% were unwilling to compromise
on human rights.
SEPTEMBER 2006
TORTURE IN IRAQ IS OUT OF HAND, SAYS
UN
GUARDIAN, UK - "Bodies often
bear signs of severe torture including acid-induced injuries
and burns caused by chemical substances, missing skin, broken
bones (back, hands, legs), missing eyes, missing teeth and wounds
caused by power drills or nails." This gruesome litany of
abuse, chronicle in a UN report published yesterday, features
on the front page of the Independent. . . Iraq is in a "state
of primal anarchy", the paper's Patrick Cockburn, in Arbil,
says. The final collapse of security in the country has been
masked from the outside world because Iraq is now too dangerous
for journalists to report what is happening there, he writes.
According to the Times, the Bush administration "reacted
angrily" to the claim by the UN's chief anti-torture campaigner.
http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article1696153.ece
14,000 HELD IN U.S. TORTURE CENTERS
PATRICK QUINN, ASSOCIATED PRESS
- In the few short years since the first shackled Afghan shuffled
off to Guantanamo, the U.S. military has created a global network
of overseas prisons, its islands of high security keeping 14,000
detainees beyond the reach of established law. Disclosures of
torture and long-term arbitrary detentions have won rebuke from
leading voices including the U.N. secretary-general and the U.S.
Supreme Court. But the bitterest words come from inside the system,
the size of several major U.S. penitentiaries. . . Captured on
battlefields, pulled from beds at midnight, grabbed off streets
as suspected insurgents, tens of thousands now have passed through
U.S. detention, the vast majority in Iraq. Many say they were
caught up in U.S. military sweeps, often interrogated around
the clock, then released months or years later without apology,
compensation or any word on why they were taken. Seventy to 90
percent of the Iraq detentions in 2003 were "mistakes,"
U.S. officers once told the international Red Cross.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060917/ap_on_re_mi_ea/in_american_hands
AIR FORCE SECRETARY WANTS TO USE TORTURE
WEAPONS ON U.S. PROTESTERS
KENNETH J. THEISEN, SF INDYMEDIA
- Defense Industry Daily described one of these weapons nicknamed
the "riot breaker." It is "a microwave transmitter
whose focused beams create burning sensations that force targets
to flee in order to escape." It allegedly does not cause
any permanent damage, but in tests the volunteers were not allowed
to wear contacts, glasses, or have any metal objects on their
persons. (So as long as no near-sighted people or persons with
coins or metal jewelry are in the crowd, things will be fine?)
The military is also developing a "sonic blaster" and
"laser dazzler." . . .
Another of these weapons is one
that directs a high-pitched, piercing tone in a tight beam according
to American Technology Corp. which is developing the weapon.
It can be as loud as 150 decibels. "That's a sensitive region
for developing hearing loss. The longer the duration, the more
serious it is," states Richard Salvi of the Center for Hearing
and Deafness at the University of Buffalo.
Until Wynne's statement the military
has always inferred that these weapons would be used abroad as
if injuring "foreigners" was acceptable. But he has
let the cat out of the bag by making clear that Americans can
be the target just as easily as Iraqi insurgents. According to
a September 1, 2005 NPR report police departments across the
country have also expressed interest in using them. In some areas
hit by Katrina they were actually deployed. . .
This statement by the Air Force
Secretary was no slip of the tongue either. As early as 2004,
the Air Force used social science students at the University
of Minnesota to review and assess literature to assess how Americans
and other cultures might react to the use of such weapons. It
appears that Wynne now wants to move into actual field trials.
The regime probably also wants to see what public reaction it
will get from this recent statement. . .
There is recent precedent for
using "non-lethal weapons" against mass protest. In
April 2003, police in Oakland, California used rubber bullets,
wooden pellets, and bean bags against anti-war protesters and
dock workers injuring several. Tear gas has always been a weapon
in their arsenal and been used many times, including against
protestors at the 2004 Republican National Convention where hundreds
of thousands demonstrated against the Bush regime. But these
weapons have not stopped protesters. It seems that the regime
now wants to up the ante and increase the effectiveness of its
weapons.
http://sf.indymedia.org/news/2006/09/1732384.php
BRITAIN'S TOP LEGAL OFFICIAL CALLS GITMO
'SHOCKING AFFRONT'
Guantanamo Bay is a "shocking
affront to the principles of democracy" and a violation
of the rule of law, the lord chancellor, Lord Falconer, said
today. The criticism from the highest-ranking official in the
British legal system represents the most direct government attack
yet on the US military detention camp. . . Lord Falconer said
Washington was "deliberately seeking to put the Guantánamo
detainees beyond the reach of law" and that "use of
torture by a state is contrary to fundamental human rights law".
. . "Democracies can only survive where judges have the
power to protect the rights of the individual," he said.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,,1871628,00.html
BUSH OUTSOURCES ABU GHRAIB TORTURE TO
IRAQIS
TELEGRAPH UK - The notorious
Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad is at the centre of fresh abuse
allegations just a week after it was handed over to Iraqi authorities,
with claims that inmates are being tortured by their new captors.
. .
An independent witness who went into Abu Ghraib this week told
The Sunday Telegraph that screams were coming from the cell blocks
housing the terrorist suspects. Prisoners released from the jail
this week spoke of routine torture of terrorism suspects and
on Wednesday, 27 prisoners were hanged in the first mass execution
since the overthrow of Saddam Hussein's regime. Conditions in
the rest of the jail were grim, with an overwhelming stench of
excrement, prisoners crammed into cells for all but 20 minutes
a day, food rations cut to just rice and water and no air conditioning.
Some of the small number of prisoners who remained in the jail
after the Americans left said they had pleaded to go with their
departing captors, rather than be left in the hands of Iraqi
guards. . .
Access to the part of the prison
containing terrorism suspects was denied, but from that block
came the sound of screaming. The screaming continued for a long
time. "I am sure someone was being beaten, they were screaming
like they were being hit," the witness reported. "I
felt scared, I was asking what was happening in the terrorist
section.
"I heard shouting, like someone had a hot iron on their
body, screams. The officer said they were just screaming by themselves.
I was hearing the screams throughout the visit."
The witness said that even in
the thieves' section prisoners were being treated badly. "Someone
was shouting 'Please help us, we want the human rights officers,
we want the Americans to come back'," he said.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/09/10/wirq10.xml
EUROPE'S TOP HUMAN RIGHTS OFFICIAL CALLS
BUSH'S ACTION IN WAR ON TERROR 'CRIMINAL'
DW, GERMANY - Europe's top human
rights official called the US government's actions in fighting
the so-called war on terror "criminal" Thursday and
said that Washington's admission of secret CIA prisons has justified
European suspicions. "Kidnapping people and torturing them
in secret -- however tempting the short-term gain may appear
to be -- is what criminals do, not democratic governments,"
said Council of Europe President Rene van der Linden. "In
the long term, such practices create more terrorists and undermine
the values we are fighting for. Europe will have no part in such
a degrading system."
http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2166967,00.html
REPORT: U.S. PRISONER TORTURE WAS ROUTINE
BBC - Abuses at Abu Ghraib were
blamed on a few rogue US soldiers The torture of prisoners in
US custody in Iraq was authorized and routine even after the
Abu Ghraib scandal came to light, a US-based rights group says.
Soldiers' accounts show that detainees routinely faced severe
beatings, sleep deprivation and other abuses for much of 2003-2005,
Human Rights Watch says. Soldiers who tried to complain about
the abuse were rebuffed or ignored. But a Pentagon spokesman
said 12 reviews had found there was no policy condoning or encouraging
abuse. . .
The HRW report gives first-hand
accounts of abuses at a detention centre at Baghdad airport called
Camp Nama, as well as a facility near Mosul airport and a base
near al-Qaim on the Syrian border. An interrogator posted at
Mosul in 2004 told HRW that he and his fellow interrogators had
been told by the officer in charge of their unit to use abuse
techniques on some detainees. He described how they used dogs
to intimidate the detainees, had them walking on their knees
in the gravel and standing for extended periods with arms outstretched
holding water bottles.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/5206908.stm
CHICAGO POLICE TORTURED SUSPECTS IN
1970S-1980S
DON BABWIN, AP - Chicago police beat, kicked, shocked, or otherwise
tortured scores of black suspects in the 1970s and 1980s to try
to extract confessions, prosecutors reported yesterday. However,
the prosecutors, who had been appointed by a Cook County judge
four years ago to look into torture allegations, said that the
cases are too old or too weak to prosecute anyone now. Two prosecutors,
Robert D. Boyle and Edward Egan, said they found evidence that
police had abused at least half the 148 suspects whose cases
were reviewed. Almost all of the suspects were black, the investigation
has found.
Among other things, the suspects
had said police beat them, played mock Russian roulette, administered
electric shocks with a cattle prod-like device and a crank-operated
"black box" used for shocks, and threw typewriter covers
over suspects' heads to make them gasp for air.
MAY 2006
AMNESTY: USA FOSTERING TORTURE
MATTHEW SCHOFIELD KNIGHT RIDDER
NEWSPAPERS - Torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment
of detainees by U.S. forces is widespread and, in many cases,
sanctioned by top government officials, Amnesty International
charged Wednesday. . .
"Although the U.S. government
continues to assert its condemnation of torture and ill-treatment,
these statements contradict what is happening in practice,"
said Curt Goering, the group's senior deputy executive director
in the United States. "The U.S. government is not only failing
to take steps to eradicate torture, it is actually creating a
climate in which torture and other ill-treatment can flourish.".
. .
A Pentagon spokesman, Lt. Col.
Mark Ballesteros, said "humane treatment of detainees is
and always has been the (Defense Department) standard."
He noted that a dozen reviews of military detention operations
had found no evidence that the top officials encouraged abuse.
The report notes that American
military officials have listed 34 deaths of detainees in U.S.
custody as "confirmed or suspected criminal homicides."
It suggested that the true number may be much higher, saying
"there is evidence that delays, cover-ups and deficiencies
in investigations have hampered the collection of evidence.".
. .
The report criticizes the United
States for giving those convicted of abuse relatively light sentences.
"The heaviest sentence imposed
on anyone to date for a torture-related death while in U.S. custody
is five months, the same sentence that you might receive in the
U.S. for stealing a bicycle," Goering said. "In this
case, the five-month sentence was for assaulting a 22-year-old
taxi driver who was hooded and chained to a ceiling while being
kicked and beaten until he died."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/050406A.shtml
REPORT
http://web.amnesty.org/library/index/engamr510612006
SUPERMAX: THE ROOTS OF ABU GHRAIB
LA TIMES - Halfway through the
trial, prison expert James E. Aiken looked straight at jurors
and told them what Zacarias Moussaoui could expect if they sent
him away for the rest of his life. "I have seen them rot,"
he said. "They rot."
Aiken was describing what happens
to the nation's highest-risk prisoners after they settle in at
the federal government's maximum-security prison in Florence,
Colo., known as Supermax. . . They exist alone in soundproof
cells as small as 7 feet by 12 feet, with a concrete-poured desk,
bed and stool, a small shower and sink, and a TV that offers
religious and anger-management programs.
They are locked down 23 hours
a day.
Larry Homenick, a former U.S.
marshal who has taken prisoners to Supermax, said that there
was a small triangular recreation area, known as "the dog
run," where solitary Supermax prisoners could occasionally
get a glimpse of sky.
He said it was chilling to walk
down the cellblocks and glance through the plexiglass "sally
port" chambers into the cells and see the faces inside.
Life there is harsh. Food is
delivered through a slit in the cell door. Prisoners don't leave
their cells to see a lawyer, a doctor or a prison official; those
visitors must go to the cell.
But prisoners can earn extra
privileges, like a wider variety of television offerings, more
exercise time and visitation rights, based on their behavior.
. .
Christopher Boyce, a convicted
spy who was incarcerated at Supermax, left the prison about 100
miles south of Denver with no regret. "You're slowly hung,"
he once told The Times. "You're ground down. You can barely
keep your sanity."
APRIL 2006
PENTAGON ADMITS AT LEAST 460 CASE OF
TORTURE OR ABUSE
REPORTERS COMMITTEE FOR A FREE
PRESS - A report by three human rights groups finds that U.S.
troops and government civilians in Iraq, Afghanaistan and Guantanamo
Bay abused, tortured or killed at least 460 prisoners, Free Press
News Services reports. A Pentagon spokesman told the Free Press
that the Defense Department had investigated more than 600 allegations
of abuse and held more than 250 service members responsible.
http://www.rcfp.org/behindthehomefront
CIA MADE MORE THAN 1,000 KIDNAPPING
AND TORTURE FLIGHTS OVER EUROPE
RICHARD NORTON-TAYLOR, GUARDIAN
- The CIA has operated more than 1,000 secret flights over EU
territory in the past five years, some to transfer terror suspects
in a practice known as "extraordinary rendition", an
investigation by the European parliament said yesterday. The
figure is significantly higher than previously thought. EU parliamentarians
who conducted the investigation concluded that incidents when
terror suspects were handed over to US agents did not appear
to be isolated. They said the suspects were often transported
around Europe on the same planes by agents whose names repeatedly
came up in their investigation.
They accused the CIA of kidnapping
terror suspects and said those responsible for monitoring air
safety regulations revealed unusual flight paths to and from
European airports. The report's author, Italian MEP Claudio Fava,
suggested some EU governments knew about the flights. He suggested
flight plans and airport logs made it hard to believe that many
of the stopovers were refuelling missions. "The CIA has,
on several occasions, clearly been responsible for kidnapping
and illegally detaining alleged terrorists on the territory of
member states, as well as for extraordinary renditions,"
said Mr Fava, a member of the European parliament's socialist
group.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1762212,00.html
MORE TORTURE FOUND IN IRAQ
ELLEN KNICKMEYER WASHINGTON POST - Last Nov. 13, U.S. soldiers found
173 incarcerated men, some of them emaciated and showing signs
of torture, in a secret bunker in an Interior Ministry compound
in central Baghdad. The soldiers immediately transferred the
men to a separate detention facility to protect them from further
abuse, the U.S. military reported.
Since then, there have been at
least six joint U.S.-Iraqi inspections of detention centers,
most of them run by Iraq's Shiite Muslim-dominated Interior Ministry.
Two sources involved with the inspections, one Iraqi official
and one U.S. official, said abuse of prisoners was found at all
the sites visited through February. U.S. military authorities
confirmed that signs of severe abuse were observed at two of
the detention centers.
But U.S. troops have not responded
by removing all the detainees, as they did in November. Instead,
according to U.S. and Iraqi officials, only a handful of the
most severely abused detainees at a single site were removed
for medical treatment. Prisoners at two other sites were removed
to alleviate overcrowding. U.S. and Iraqi authorities left the
rest where they were.
DISGUSTING SCENES FROM ABU GHRAIB
PAID FOR WITH YOUR TAX DOLLARS
FEBRUARY 2006
BRITISH JUDGE SAY U.S. VIEW OF TORTURE
OUT OF STEP WITH 'MOST CIVILIZED NATIONS'
GUARDIAN, UK - A high court judge
yesterday delivered a stinging attack on America, saying its
idea of what constituted torture was out of step with that of
"most civilized nations". The criticism, directed at
the Bush administration's approach to human rights, was made
by Mr Justice Collins during a hearing over the refusal by ministers
to request the release of three British residents held at Guantanamo
Bay. The judge said: "America's idea of what is torture
is not the same as ours and does not appear to coincide with
that of most civilized nations." He made his comments, he
said, after learning of the UN report that said Guantanamo should
be shut down without delay because torture was still being carried
out there. . .
http://www.guardian.co.uk/guantanamo/story/0,,1711833,00.html
JANUARY 2006
BUSH REGIME TORTURING GITMO
PRISONERS TO FORCE FOOD INTO THEM
DAVID ROSE, OBERSER, UK - New
details have emerged of how the growing number of prisoners on
hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay are being tied down and force-fed
through tubes pushed down their nasal passages into their stomachs
to keep them alive. They routinely experience bleeding and nausea,
according to a sworn statement by the camp's chief doctor, seen
by The Observer.
'Experience teaches us' that
such symptoms must be expected 'whenever nasogastric tubes are
used,' says the affidavit of Captain John S Edmondson, commander
of Guantanamo's hospital. The procedure - now standard practice
at Guantanamo - 'requires that a foreign body be inserted into
the body and, ideally, remain in it.' But staff always use a
lubricant, and 'a nasogastric tube is never inserted and moved
up and down. It is inserted down into the stomach slowly and
directly, and it would be impossible to insert the wrong end
of the tube.' Medical personnel do not insert nasogastric tubes
in a manner 'intentionally designed to inflict pain.'
It is painful, Edmonson admits.
Although 'non-narcotic pain relievers such as ibuprofen are usually
sufficient, sometimes stronger drugs,' including opiates such
as morphine, have had to be administered. . .
The London solicitors Allen and
Overy, who represent some of the hunger strikers, have lodged
a court action to be heard next week in California, where Edmondson
is registered to practice. They are asking for an order that
the state medical ethics board investigate him for 'unprofessional
conduct' for agreeing to the force-feeding.
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/world/story/0,16937,1681736,00.html?
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