A New York Times Op-Ed submitted by a former FBI supervisory special agent on the supposed "effectiveness" of torture and details of the actual Abu Zubaydah interrogation:

Op-Ed Contributor
My Tortured Decision

By ALI SOUFAN
Published: April 22, 2009

FOR seven years I have remained silent about the false claims magnifying the effectiveness of the so-called enhanced interrogation techniques like waterboarding. I have spoken only in closed government hearings, as these matters were classified. But the release last week of four Justice Department memos on interrogations allows me to shed light on the story, and on some of the lessons to be learned.

One of the most striking parts of the memos is the false premises on which they are based. The first, dated August 2002, grants authorization to use harsh interrogation techniques on a high-ranking terrorist, Abu Zubaydah, on the grounds that previous methods hadn’t been working. The next three memos cite the successes of those methods as a justification for their continued use.

It is inaccurate, however, to say that Abu Zubaydah had been uncooperative. Along with another F.B.I. agent, and with several C.I.A. officers present, I questioned him from March to June 2002, before the harsh techniques were introduced later in August. Under traditional interrogation methods, he provided us with important actionable intelligence.

We discovered, for example, that Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks. Abu Zubaydah also told us about Jose Padilla, the so-called dirty bomber. This experience fit what I had found throughout my counterterrorism career: traditional interrogation techniques are successful in identifying operatives, uncovering plots and saving lives.

There was no actionable intelligence gained from using enhanced interrogation techniques on Abu Zubaydah that wasn’t, or couldn’t have been, gained from regular tactics. In addition, I saw that using these alternative methods on other terrorists backfired on more than a few occasions — all of which are still classified. The short sightedness behind the use of these techniques ignored the unreliability of the methods, the nature of the threat, the mentality and modus operandi of the terrorists, and due process.

Defenders of these techniques have claimed that they got Abu Zubaydah to give up information leading to the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, a top aide to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and Mr. Padilla. This is false. The information that led to Mr. Shibh’s capture came primarily from a different terrorist operative who was interviewed using traditional methods. As for Mr. Padilla, the dates just don’t add up: the harsh techniques were approved in the memo of August 2002, Mr. Padilla had been arrested that May.

One of the worst consequences of the use of these harsh techniques was that it reintroduced the so-called Chinese wall between the C.I.A. and F.B.I., similar to the communications obstacles that prevented us from working together to stop the 9/11 attacks. Because the bureau would not employ these problematic techniques, our agents who knew the most about the terrorists could have no part in the investigation. An F.B.I. colleague of mine who knew more about Khalid Shaikh Mohammed than anyone in the government was not allowed to speak to him.

It was the right decision to release these memos, as we need the truth to come out. This should not be a partisan matter, because it is in our national security interest to regain our position as the world’s foremost defenders of human rights. Just as important, releasing these memos enables us to begin the tricky process of finally bringing these terrorists to justice.

The debate after the release of these memos has centered on whether C.I.A. officials should be prosecuted for their role in harsh interrogation techniques. That would be a mistake. Almost all the agency officials I worked with on these issues were good people who felt as I did about the use of enhanced techniques: it is un-American, ineffective and harmful to our national security.

Fortunately for me, after I objected to the enhanced techniques, the message came through from Pat D’Amuro, an F.B.I. assistant director, that “we don’t do that,” and I was pulled out of the interrogations by the F.B.I. director, Robert Mueller (this was documented in the report released last year by the Justice Department’s inspector general).

My C.I.A. colleagues who balked at the techniques, on the other hand, were instructed to continue. (It’s worth noting that when reading between the lines of the newly released memos, it seems clear that it was contractors, not C.I.A. officers, who requested the use of these techniques.)

As we move forward, it’s important to not allow the torture issue to harm the reputation, and thus the effectiveness, of the C.I.A. The agency is essential to our national security. We must ensure that the mistakes behind the use of these techniques are never repeated. We’re making a good start: President Obama has limited interrogation techniques to the guidelines set in the Army Field Manual, and Leon Panetta, the C.I.A. director, says he has banned the use of contractors and secret overseas prisons for terrorism suspects (the so-called black sites). Just as important, we need to ensure that no new mistakes are made in the process of moving forward — a real danger right now.

Ali Soufan was an F.B.I. supervisory special agent from 1997 to 2005.

As seen in today's NYTimes:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/24/world/middleeast/24yemen.html?_r=1&hp

Yemen Dispute Slows Closing of Guantánamo

By WILLIAM GLABERSON and ROBERT F. WORTH
Published: April 23, 2009

The Obama administration’s effort to return the largest group of Guantánamo Bay detainees to Yemen, their home country, has stalled, creating a major new hurdle for the president’s plan to close the prison camp in Cuba by next January, American and Yemeni officials say.

“We’re at a complete impasse,” said one American official who is involved in the issue but was speaking without authorization and so requested anonymity. “I don’t know that there’s a viable Plan B.”

The Yemeni government has asked Washington to return its detainees and has said that it would need substantial aid to rehabilitate the men. But the Obama administration is increasingly skeptical of Yemen’s ability to provide adequate rehabilitation and security to supervise returned prisoners. In addition, American officials are wary of sending detainees to Yemen because of growing indications of activity by Al Qaeda there.

The developments are significant for the Obama administration because the 97 Yemeni detainees make up more than 40 percent of the remaining 241 prisoners at Guantánamo Bay. The question of what to do with them “is integral to the process of closing Guantánamo,” said Ken Gude, an associate director at the Center for American Progress who has written about closing the prison camp.

The standoff over the Yemeni detainees comes on top of other difficulties that have emerged since President Obama announced his intention to close the prison that has drawn international criticism for years.

Some Republicans in Congress have mounted stiff resistance to closing Guantánamo, and officials in some American communities, fearing that terrorism suspects could be tried or held in their courts or prisons, said they would fight any such plans. Also, while some European governments have promised to resettle detainees, specific agreements have been slow in coming.

The Yemenis not only are the biggest group of detainees, but also are widely seen as the most difficult to transfer out of Guantánamo. Other countries are wary of many of the Yemeni detainees because jihadist groups have long had deep roots in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Arab world and the homeland of Osama bin Laden’s father. If the Yemenis are not sent home, there may be few other options for many of the 97 men, detainees’ lawyers and human rights groups say.

Still, Muhi al-Deen al-Dhabi, Yemen’s deputy foreign affairs minister, said in an interview that the United States was now trying to persuade other countries to accept Yemeni detainees and appeared to have rejected Yemen’s request to have its citizens at Guantánamo returned.

“If the United States is going to transfer the Yemeni detainees to a third party, we cannot stop that,” Mr. Dhabi said.

Yemen’s president, Ali Abdullah Saleh, met last month with Mr. Obama’s deputy national security adviser, John O. Brennan. The State Department said Mr. Brennan raised “the U.S. government’s concerns about the direct return of detainees to Yemen.”

The Bush administration also failed to reach a deal with President Saleh, but the Obama administration had hoped to get increased cooperation from Yemen, which critics say has a history of coddling Islamic extremists and releasing convicted terrorists. Complicating the task is the fact that security in Yemen has been deteriorating for more than a year, with several terrorist attacks, including a suicide bombing outside the American Embassy compound in September that killed 13 people.

Among the 97 Yemeni detainees are some men who appear to be candidates for transfer to other countries, including about a dozen with ties to Saudi Arabia. American officials have described some of the Yemenis as jihadist foot soldiers and have suggested that a few, like a student captured while visiting other Yemenis in Pakistan, may simply have been at the wrong place at the wrong time.

Perhaps a dozen or more Yemeni detainees could face prosecution in the United States, including Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who was charged in the Bush administration’s military commission system with being a coordinator of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

But with just nine months remaining before Mr. Obama’s January 2010 deadline for closing the prison, some lawyers for the men say they are becoming convinced that there may be no viable strategy to relocate them.

David H. Remes, a lawyer for 16 Yemeni detainees, said it appeared that many of the men might remain in American custody. “Unless President Obama reconsiders his decision to close Guantánamo,” Mr. Remes said, “the Yemeni detainees would have to be brought to the U.S. and put in some sort of prison.”

Although administration officials would not comment on the talks with Yemen, a senior administration official said the government was “working to ensure that any detainee who is transferred abroad will be appropriately monitored, rehabilitated, and assimilated back into their society.”

The complexities of the issues surrounding the detainees are a reflection of Yemen’s tangled domestic and international problems. It is a state that often appears on the verge of chaos. A weak central government is fighting a persistent insurgency in the north, restive separatists in the south and a growing Qaeda presence.

Some Yemeni officials say President Saleh, a wily former army officer, has used the internal threats — and perhaps even nurtured them — to press the United States and Yemen’s neighbor Saudi Arabia for more aid.

As a result, people who have discussed the detainee issues with Yemeni officials say the Obama administration’s frustration with the Yemeni government may be well founded.

Mr. Saleh has publicly demanded the return of the detainees. But Joanne Mariner, director of Human Rights Watch’s terrorism and counterterrorism program, said that after meeting top Yemeni officials, it appeared that the Saleh government seemed to see the detainees as a potential source of security and financial problems.

“Politically, they need to give the impression that they’re fighting to get their people back,” Ms. Mariner said, but she added that it was not clear whether the Yemeni officials were working to meet any American requirements.

One senior Yemeni official, she said, seemed to suggest that Yemen would require a huge payment from the American government to resettle the detainees. A proper rehabilitation program, the official claimed, could cost as much as $1 million for each detainee, totaling nearly $100 million.

In the recent interview, Mr. Dhabi, the deputy foreign affairs minister, did not mention a price tag. But he said that creating a rehabilitation program would be “long, costly and would require cooperation.” He said the Americans were “disappointed” to hear that.

Every option for the Yemenis at Guantánamo seems to have its roadblocks. There have long been reports that many Yemeni detainees may go to Saudi Arabia’s rehabilitation program for former jihadists. That program has been widely praised in the Middle East, despite recent disclosures that some graduates who are former Guantánamo detainees have returned to terrorism.

But the Saudis have noted that Yemen demands that its citizens be sent home, and a high-level Saudi official said his country would not take any of the detainees unless Yemen asked it to.

William Glaberson reported from New York, and Robert F. Worth from Beirut, Lebanon. Margot Williams contributed reporting from New York.

Obama Upholds Detainee Policy in Afghanistan
By CHARLIE SAVAGE at the New York Times

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration has told a federal judge that military detainees in Afghanistan have no legal right to challenge their imprisonment there, embracing a key argument of former President Bush’s legal team.

In a two-sentence filing late Friday, the Justice Department said that the new administration had reviewed its position in a case brought by prisoners at the United States Air Force base at Bagram, just north of the Afghan capital. The Obama team determined that the Bush policy was correct: such prisoners cannot sue for their release.

“Having considered the matter, the government adheres to its previously articulated position,” wrote Michael F. Hertz, acting assistant attorney general.

The closely watched case is a habeas corpus lawsuit on behalf of several prisoners who have been indefinitely detained for years without trial. The detainees argue that they are not enemy combatants, and they want a judge to review the evidence against them and order the military to release them.

The Bush administration had argued that federal courts have no jurisdiction to hear such a case because the prisoners are noncitizens being held in the course of military operations outside the United States. The Obama team was required to take a stand on whether those arguments were correct because a federal district judge, John D. Bates, asked the new government whether it wanted to alter that position.

The Obama administration’s decision was generally expected among legal specialists. But it was a blow to human rights lawyers who have challenged the Bush administration’s policy of indefinitely detaining “enemy combatants” without trials.

The power of civilian federal judges to review individual decisions by the executive branch to hold a terrorism suspect as an enemy combatant was one of the most contentious legal issues surrounding the Bush administration. For years, President Bush’s legal team argued that federal judges had no authority under the Constitution to hear challenges by detainees being held at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and elsewhere.

The Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration’s legal view for prisoners held at Guantánamo in landmark rulings in 2004 and 2006. But those rulings were based on the idea that the prison was on United States soil for constitutional purposes, based on the unique legal circumstances and history of the naval base.

Rights lawyers have been hoping that courts would extend those rulings to allow long-term detainees being held at United States military bases elsewhere in the world to sue for release, too. There are about 600 detainees at Bagram and several thousand in Iraq.

Jack Balkin, a Yale Law School professor, said it was too early to tell what the Obama administration would end up doing with the detainees at Bagram. He said some observers believed that the Obama team would end up making a major change in policy but simply needed more time to come up with it, while others believed that the administration had decided “to err on the side of doing things more like the Bush administration did, as opposed to really rethinking and reorienting everything” about the detention policies it inherited because it had too many other problems to deal with.

“It may take some time before we see exactly what is going on — whether this is just a transitory policy or whether this is really their policy: ‘No to Guantánamo, but we can just create Guantánamo in some other place,’ ” Mr. Balkin said.

From the New York Times:

LONDON — A Guantánamo detainee whose case has drawn international attention because of his claims that he was tortured while in C.I.A. custody, is scheduled to arrive back in Britain on Monday, according to his lawyers and British officials.

The detainee, Binyam Mohamed, has been in American custody for nearly seven years, held and interrogated first in Pakistan, then for 18 months in Morocco, before being sent to the Guantánamo Bay prison camp.

His return will end an 18-month stand off between the United States and Britain, which has been seeking his release since August 2007.

It will not, however, end an effort by Mr. Mohamed’s lawyers and some members of Parliament here to obtain photographs that Mr. Mohamed said were taken by an American woman and that showed his injuries, according to notes of his conversations with his lawyer, who provided them to The New York Times.

At the time of his arrest, in April 2002, American officials said that Mr. Mohamed, who has a brother and two sisters living in the United States, was part of a conspiracy to detonate a dirty bomb on American soil. But he will leave Guantánamo without having been charged with any terrorist activity, or other crimes.

“I am confident he will be home tomorrow,” said Clive Stafford-Smith, his lawyer, “and it is not a moment too soon.” A British government official who declined to be identified confirmed this, but would give no other details. On Friday, the British Foreign Office issued a statement that final arrangements were under way for Mr. Mohamed’s release.

American Embassy officials in London refused to comment on the situation, saying that as a matter of policy they could talk about Guantánamo releases that had not happened yet.

The British government began concentrated efforts for Mr. Mohamed’s return in August 2007, but was rebuffed by the Bush administration.

One stumbling block was the restrictions to be put on Mr. Mohamed when he was released. The British government said it could not impose the conditions wanted by the United States, which included electronic surveillance and an official control order, because they violated British and European human rights law.

Mr. Mohamed has agreed to voluntary restrictions, including a lifetime prohibition on travel to the United States, people who have seen the restrictions said. Those people spoke on condition of anonymity, and gave no more details about the restrictions, because the terms of Mr. Mohamed’s release had not been publicly released.

Mr. Mohamed was born in Ethiopia, but his family fled for political reasons in the early 1990s. Mr. Mohamed moved to Britain in 1994, where he was unemployed and into drugs, his lawyer said. In 2000, he went to Afghanistan, to get off drugs (the Taliban had a strict policy against domestic drug use) and to decide whether it was a “good Islamic country or not,” he told his lawyer.

American officials have said that he attended military training camps in Afghanistan. Mr. Mohamed has said he was training to fight in support of Muslim insurgents in Chechnya, and not to carry out terrorist attacks in the United States.

After the fighting broke out between the United States and Taliban in late 2001, Mr. Mohamed fled Afghanistan. He was picked up in Karachi, trying to get on a plane back to Britain, with a false British passport. He said his had been lost.

After several months of interrogation in Pakistan, he was secretly taken on a C.I.A.-chartered plane to Morocco, according to the plane’s flight logs and British officials. The C.I.A. has repeatedly declined to say if he was ever held in Morocco, and has steadfastly denied that Mr. Mohamed, or anyone else in its custody, was ever tortured.

At a news conference here last week, his military lawyer, Lt. Col. Yvonne Bradley of the United States Air Force, said that what Mr. Mohamed endured at Guantánamo “makes waterboarding look like child’s play.”

For 18 months, “I never went outside, I never saw the sun, not even once,” Mr. Stafford-Smith quoted Mr. Mohamed as saying during one of their many sessions at the prison camp. Immediately after each interview, Mr. Stafford-Smith would write down what he had been told and submit it to the military for clearance.

Mr. Stafford-Smith provided the Times with a 25-page memorandum of his interviews with Mr. Mohamed, which had been cleared by the military.

Interrogators in Morocco showed him pictures of various Al Qaeda leaders and asked him if he knew them. He insisted he did not.

One night, three men in black masks and military trousers came in, Mr. Mohamed told Mr. Stafford-Smith. “One stood on each of my shoulders and the third punched me in the stomach,” Mr. Mohamed said. “It seemed to go on for hours,” he said. “I vomited within the first few punches.”

Other times, they tied him to a wall, his feet just off the floor, he said. They brought in women, “naked or part naked,” he said.

On one occasion, while tied to the wall, his clothes were stripped off, he said. Then, one man took a scalpel and made cuts on his chest. Then they cut his genitals, Mr. Mohamed said.

“I suffered the razor treatment about once a month,” Mr. Mohamed said, according to Mr. Stafford Smith’s declassified notes of the interview.

In January 2004, five soldiers, wearing face masks and Timberland boots, dragged him from his cell and stripped him. He heard an American accent.

There was a female in the group. She took pictures of his wounds with a digital camera, he said. “She was one of the few Americans who ever showed me any sympathy,” Mr. Mohamed told his lawyer. “When she saw the injuries I had she gasped. She said, ‘Oh my God, look at that!’”

He was taken to American-run Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, his lawyer said, where more photos were taken. One of the soldiers told him it was “to show Washington it’s healing,” Mr. Mohamed told his lawyer.

Mr. Mohamed’s lawyers have been trying to obtain the pictures as well as other documents, which they say support Mr. Mohamed’s allegations. A British court has said that the classified documents support Mr. Mohamed’s claims, but the American and British governments have objected to their release.

Last week, our chapter of Amnesty International wrote an Urgent Action letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, amongst other officials, regarding the case of 17 Uighur detainees who have been cleared of all charges, yet have remained in Guantanamo (this is their seventh year in detention) for lack of a safe country that will accept them, as the Uighurs are a fairly persecuted minority group in China. Today, the US Court of Appeals ruled that a previous judge's verdict in October, declaring that the Uighurs were free of all charges and should be released into the U.S., was too hasty, and have declared that the Uighurs should currently remain in the Guantanamo Bay camp. Given President Obama's executive proclamation/attempt to have Gitmo closed within a year, it will be interesting to see how he resolves this judicial conflict and whether or not he decrees that the Uighurs may be given refuge in the US.

From the New York Times:

Release of Guantánamo Detainees to U.S Barred

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A federal appeals court on Wednesday ruled that 17 Turkic Muslims cleared for release from Guantanamo Bay must stay at the prison camp, raising the stakes for an Obama administration that has pledged to quickly close the facility and free those who have not been charged.

In a showdown over presidential power, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit said a judge went too far last October in ordering the U.S. entry of the 17 men, known as Uighurs (WEE'-gurz), over the objections of the Bush administration.

The three-judge panel suggested the detainees might be able to seek entry by applying to the Homeland Security Department, which administers U.S. immigration laws. But the court bluntly concluded the detainees otherwise had no constitutional right to immediate freedom after being held in custody at the facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, without charges for nearly seven years.

''Such sentiments, however high-minded, do not represent a legal basis for upsetting settled law and overriding the prerogatives of the political branches,'' wrote Judge A. Raymond Randolph, an appointee of President George H.W. Bush.

Attorneys for the detainees said they were considering whether to appeal the decision to the full appeals court or the Supreme Court. But they made clear it was now time for President Barack Obama to take action after eight years of Bush administration detention policies.

''The ball is in President Obama's court,'' said Emi MacLean, an attorney with the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights. ''If he is genuinely committed to closing Guantanamo, one clear and immediate step he should take is release the Uighurs into the U.S.''

The White House declined to comment on the ruling, citing its ongoing review on closing the Guantanamo prison. Within days of taking office, Obama ordered Guantanamo closed in a year. But he has since been largely quiet on where the hundreds of prisoners -- most of whom are being held without charges -- should be released if no country is willing to take them.

The State Department has said it is continuing diplomatic efforts to resettle the Uighurs and other detainees in other countries.

At issue in the case was whether a federal judge has the authority to order the release of prisoners at Guantanamo who were unlawfully detained by the United States and cannot be sent back to their homeland. The Muslims were cleared for release from Guantanamo as early as 2003 but fear they will be tortured if they are returned to China.

Earlier this month, Beijing warned other countries not to accept the men.

U.S. District Judge Ricardo Urbina in October ordered the government to release the 17 men into the United States, noting that they were no longer considered enemy combatants. He sternly rebuked the Bush administration for a detention policy toward the Uighurs that ''crossed the constitutional threshold into infinitum.''

But in Wednesday's decision, the three-judge panel made up of one Democratic and two Republican appointees disagreed.

''The government has represented that it is continuing diplomatic attempts to find an appropriate country willing to admit petitioners, and we have no reason to doubt that it is doing so,'' Randolph wrote. ''Nor do we have the power to require anything more.''

Judge Judith Rogers, who was appointed by former President Bill Clinton, wrote in a separate opinion that Urbina might have constitutional authority to release the men based on recent Supreme Court rulings. But Rogers said Urbina's decision was premature because he had not yet heard from U.S. immigration officials.

The Supreme Court has held that Guantanamo Bay detainees can go to court to challenge their imprisonment. Wednesday's appeals court ruling effectively means that a judge can hear the case but in some instances have no authority to actually free the detainees.

''Today's decision represents a disappointing step back towards the Bush administration's unlawful Guantanamo policies,'' said Jameel Jaffer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union National Security Project. ''These men were cleared for release but have been held without charge in a system that utterly disregards the fundamental tenets of due process.''

Roughly 20 percent of about 250 detainees who remain at Guantanamo fear torture or persecution if they return to their home countries, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights. The Bush administration had maintained that, unless another country agrees to take them, the detainees should stay at Guantanamo.

Uighurs are from Xinjiang -- an isolated region that borders Afghanistan, Pakistan and six Central Asian nations -- and say they have been repressed by the Chinese government. China has long said that insurgents are leading an Islamic separatist movement in Xinjiang. The Uighur detainees were captured in Pakistan and Afghanistan in 2001.

Albania accepted five Uighur detainees in 2006 but has since balked on taking others, partly for fear of diplomatic repercussions from China.

A Swedish immigration court initially granted asylum to one of those men on Wednesday, although the Swedish migration board is now appealing the decision to a higher court. Adil Hakimjan applied for asylum in Sweden because his sister lives there.

----

Associated Press writer Matthew Barakat contributed to this report.

Update: Article reviewing news of the official signature of the orders today: Obama Orders Secret Prisons and Detention Camps Closed

NYTimes: Obama to Close Foreign Prisons and Guantánamo Camp

By MARK MAZZETTI and WILLIAM GLABERSON
Published: January 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — President Obama is expected to sign executive orders Thursday directing the Central Intelligence Agency to shut what remains of its network of secret prisons and ordering the closing of the Guantánamo detention camp within a year, government officials said.

The orders, which would be the first steps in undoing detention policies of former President George W. Bush, would rewrite American rules for the detention of terrorism suspects. They would require an immediate review of the 245 detainees still held at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, to determine if they should be transferred, released or prosecuted.

And the orders would bring to an end a Central Intelligence Agency program that kept terrorism suspects in secret custody for months or years, a practice that has brought fierce criticism from foreign governments and human rights activists. They will also prohibit the C.I.A. from using coercive interrogation methods, requiring the agency to follow the same rules used by the military in interrogating terrorism suspects, government officials said.

But the orders would leave unresolved complex questions surrounding the closing of the Guantánamo prison, including whether, where and how many of the detainees are to be prosecuted. They could also allow Mr. Obama to reinstate the C.I.A.’s detention and interrogation operations in the future, by presidential order, as some have argued would be appropriate if Osama bin Laden or another top-level leader of Al Qaeda were captured.

The new White House counsel, Gregory B. Craig, briefed lawmakers about some elements of the orders on Wednesday evening. A Congressional official who attended the session said Mr. Craig acknowledged concerns from intelligence officials that new restrictions on C.I.A. methods might be unwise and indicated that the White House might be open to allowing the use of methods other the 19 techniques allowed for the military.

Details of the directive involving the C.I.A. were described by government officials who insisted on anonymity so they could not be blamed for pre-empting a White House announcement. Copies of the draft order on Guantánamo were provided by people who have consulted with Mr. Obama’s transition team and requested anonymity for the same reason.

The executive order on interrogations is certain to be received with some skepticism at the C.I.A., which for years has maintained that the military’s interrogation rules are insufficient to get information from senior Qaeda figures like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The Bush administration asserted that the harsh interrogation methods were instrumental in gaining valuable intelligence on Qaeda operations.

The intelligence agency built a network of secret prisons in 2002 to house and interrogate senior Qaeda figures captured overseas. The exact number of suspects to have moved through the prisons is unknown, although Michael V. Hayden, the departing director of the agency, has in the past put the number at “fewer than 100.”

The secret detentions brought international condemnation, and in September 2006, President Bush ordered that the remaining 14 detainees in C.I.A. custody be transferred to Guantánamo Bay and tried by military tribunals.

But Mr. Bush made clear then that he was not shutting down the C.I.A. detention system, and in the last two years, two Qaeda operatives are believed to have been detained in agency prisons for several months each before being sent to Guantánamo.

A government official said Mr. Obama’s order on the C.I.A. would still allow its officers abroad to temporarily detain terrorism suspects and transfer them to other agencies, but would no longer allow the agency to carry out long-term detentions.

Since the early days after the 2001 attacks, the intelligence agency’s role in detaining terrorism suspects has been significantly scaled back, as has the severity of interrogation methods the agency is permitted to use. The most controversial practice, the simulated drowning technique known as water-boarding, was used on three suspects but has not been used since 2003, C.I.A. officials said.

But at the urging of the Bush administration, Congress in 2006 authorized the agency to continue using harsher interrogation methods than those permitted for use by other agencies, including the military. Those exact methods remain classified. The order on Guantánamo says that the camp, which received its first hooded and chained detainees seven years ago this month, “shall be closed as soon as practicable, and no later than one year from the date of this order.”

The order calls for a cabinet-level panel to grapple with issues including where in the United States prisoners might be moved and what courts they could be tried in. It also provides for a new diplomatic effort to transfer some of the remaining men, including more than 60 that the Bush administration had cleared for release.

The order also directs an immediate assessment of the prison itself to ensure that the men are held in conditions that meet the humanitarian requirements of the Geneva Convention. That provision appeared to be a pointed embrace of the international treaties that the Bush administration often argued did not apply to detainees captured in the war against terrorism.

The seven years of the detention camp have included four suicides, hunger strikes by scores of detainees, and accusations of extensive use of solitary confinement and abusive interrogations, which the Department of Defense has long denied. Last week a senior Pentagon official said she had concluded that interrogators at Guantánamo had tortured one detainee, who officials have said was a would-be “20th hijacker” in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The report of Thursday’s expected announcement came after the new administration late Tuesday night ordered an immediate halt to the military commission proceedings for prosecuting detainees at Guantánamo and filed a request in Federal District Court in Washington to stay habeas corpus proceedings there. Government lawyers described both delays as necessary for the administration to make a broad assessment of detention policy.

The cases immediately affected include those of five detainees charged as the coordinators of the 2001 attacks, including the case against Mr. Mohammed, the self-described mastermind.

The decision to stop the commissions was described by the military prosecutors as a pause in the war-crimes system “to permit the newly inaugurated president and his administration time to review the military commission process generally and the cases currently pending before the military commissions, specifically.”

More than 200 detainees’ habeas corpus cases have been filed in federal court, and lawyers said they expected that all of the cases would be stayed.

Mr. Obama had suggested in the campaign that, in place of military commissions, he would prefer prosecutions in federal courts or, perhaps, in the existing military justice system, which provides legal guarantees similar to those of American civilian courts.

Some human rights groups and lawyers for detainees said they were concerned about the one-year timetable. “It only took days to put these men in Guantánamo; it shouldn’t take a year to get them out,” said Vincent Warren, the executive director of the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York, which has coordinated detainees’ lawyers.

But several groups that had criticized the Bush administration’s policies applauded the rapid moves by the new administration. Mr. Obama’s actions “reaffirmed American values and are a ray of light after eight long, dark years,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Mark Mazzetti reported from Washington, and William Glaberson from New York. Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Washington.

I think this man really CAN make you believe in something as broad as hope and change when he takes such immediate action on a human rights situation that has been stunted for years. Of course, he will face a major legal/political quagmire in deciding how to deal with the trials/potential release/displacement of all of the remaining detainees, but for now, we can, I think, celebrate the fact that he has at least taken a decisive, sweepingly symbolic step to rectify America's standards of respect for human rights. GLORY BE:

NYTimes - Obama Plans to Order Closing of Guantánamo on 1st Full Day

By WILLIAM GLABERSON and HELENE COOPER
Published: January 12, 2009

President-elect Barack Obama plans to issue an executive order on his first full day in office directing the closing of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp in Cuba, people briefed by Obama transition officials said Monday.

But experts say it is likely to take many months, perhaps as long as a year, to empty the prison that has drawn international criticism since it received its first prisoners seven years ago this week. One transition official said the new administration expected that it would take several months to transfer some of the remaining 248 prisoners to other countries, decide how to try suspects and deal with the many other legal challenges posed by closing the camp.

People who have discussed the issues with transition officials in recent weeks said it appeared that the broad outlines of plans for the detention camp were taking shape. They said transition officials appeared committed to ordering an immediate suspension of the Bush administration’s military commissions system for trying detainees.

In addition, people who have conferred with transition officials said the incoming administration appeared to have rejected a proposal to seek a new law authorizing indefinite detention inside the United States. The Bush administration has insisted that such a measure is necessary to close the Guantánamo camp and bring some detainees to the United States.

Mr. Obama has repeatedly said he wants to close the camp. But in an interview on Sunday on ABC, he indicated that the process could take time, saying, “It is more difficult than I think a lot of people realize.” Closing it within the first 100 days of his administration, he said, would be “a challenge.”

The president-elect drew criticism from some human rights groups Monday who said his remarks suggested that closing Guantánamo was not among the new administration’s highest priorities. But even if the detention camp remains open for months, the decision to address Guantánamo on the day after his inauguration seemed intended to make a symbolic break with some of the most controversial policies of the Bush administration.

Several national security and legal analysts have argued in recent weeks that Mr. Obama is in a delicate political position after having committed himself to closing the prison. Sarah Mendelson, the author of a report for the Center for Strategic and International Studies on how to close the prison, said Mr. Obama’s remarks on Sunday appeared intended to indicate the difficulty of the task, which she said it could take a year to complete.

“I thought he was trying to manage expectations of how quickly those detainees who remain can be sorted into two categories: those who will be released and those who will be prosecuted,” Ms. Mendelson said.

Aside from analyzing intelligence and legal filings on each of the remaining detainees, diplomats and legal experts have said the new administration will need to begin an extensive new international effort to resettle as many as 150 or more of the remaining men. Portugal and other European countries have recently broken a long diplomatic standoff, saying they would work with the new administration and might accept some detainees who cannot be sent to their home countries because of concerns about their potential treatment.

The transition official, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss the plans, said the administration expected to announce its Guantánamo plans next Wednesday.

Brooke Anderson, a transition spokeswoman, declined to comment on any plans, saying only, “President-elect Obama has repeatedly said that he believes that the legal framework at Guantánamo has failed to successfully and swiftly prosecute terrorists, and he shares the broad bipartisan belief that Guantánamo should be closed.”

In formulating their policy in recent weeks, Obama transition officials have consulted with a variety of authorities on legal and human rights and with military experts. Several of those experts said the officials had expressed great interest in alternatives to the military commission system, like trying detainees in federal courts, and appeared to have grown hostile to proposals like an indefinite detention law.

They also said the transition officials were intensely focused on new international efforts to transfer many of the detainees to other countries.

Ex-Detainee of U.S. Describes a 6-Year Ordeal
By JANE PERLEZ, RAYMOND BONNER and SALMAN MASOOD
Published: January 5, 2009

Click here for a video interview with Muhammad Saad Iqbal

LAHORE, Pakistan — When Muhammad Saad Iqbal arrived home here in August after more than six years in American custody, including five at the military prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, he had difficulty walking, his left ear was severely infected, and he was dependent on a cocktail of antibiotics and antidepressants.

In November, a Pakistani surgeon operated on his ear, physical therapists were working on lower back problems and a psychiatrist was trying to wean him off the drugs he carried around in a white, plastic shopping bag.

The maladies, said Mr. Iqbal, 31, a professional reader of the Koran, are the result of a gantlet of torture, imprisonment and interrogation for which his Washington lawyer plans to sue the United States government.

The coming administration of President-elect Barack Obama is weighing whether to close the Guantánamo prison, which many critics have called an extralegal system of detention and abuse.

But the full stories of individual detainees like Mr. Iqbal are only now emerging after years in which they were shuttled around the globe under the Bush administration’s system of extraordinary rendition, which used foreign countries to interrogate and detain terrorism suspects in sites beyond the reach of American courts.

Mr. Iqbal was never convicted of any crime, or even charged with one. He was quietly released from Guantánamo with a routine explanation that he was no longer considered an enemy combatant, part of an effort by the Bush administration to reduce the prison’s population.

“I feel ashamed what the Americans did to me in this period,” Mr. Iqbal said, speaking for the first time at length about his ordeal during several hours of interviews with The New York Times, including one from his hospital bed in Lahore.

Mr. Iqbal was arrested early in 2002 in Jakarta, Indonesia, after boasting to members of an Islamic group that he knew how to make a shoe bomb, according to two senior American officials who were in Jakarta at the time.

Mr. Iqbal now denies ever having made the statement, but two days after his arrest, he said, the Central Intelligence Agency transferred him to Egypt. He was later shifted to the American prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan, and ultimately to Guantánamo Bay.

Much of Mr. Iqbal’s account could not be independently corroborated. Two senior American officials confirmed that Mr. Iqbal had been “rendered” from Indonesia, but could not comment on, or confirm details of, how he was treated in custody. The Pentagon and C.I.A. deny using torture, and American diplomatic, military and intelligence officials agreed to talk about the case only on the condition of anonymity because the files are classified.

After Mr. Iqbal was picked up in Jakarta and interrogated for two days, American officials generally concluded that he was a braggart, a “wannabe,” and should be released, one of the senior American officials in Jakarta said. “He was a talker,” the senior American official said. “He wanted to believe he was more important than he was.”

There was no evidence that he had ever met Osama bin Laden, or had been to Afghanistan, the two senior American officials said. But in the atmosphere of fear and confusion in the months after Sept. 11, 2001, Mr. Iqbal was secretly moved to Egypt for further interrogation, said one of the senior American officials.

Mr. Iqbal said he had been beaten, tightly shackled, covered with a hood and given drugs, subjected to electric shocks and, because he denied knowing Mr. bin Laden, deprived of sleep for six months. “They make me blind and stand up for whole days,” he said in halting English, meaning that he had been covered with a hood or blindfolded.

The Pentagon and the C.I.A. have a policy of not talking about the detainees, but a C.I.A. spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, said, “The agency’s terrorist detention program has used lawful means of interrogation, reviewed and approved by the Department of Justice and briefed to the Congress.

“This individual, from what I have heard of his account, appears to be describing something utterly different,” Mr. Gimigliano added. “I have no idea what he’s talking about. The United States does not conduct or condone torture.”

Mr. Iqbal said he traveled to Jakarta in November 2001 on a personal odyssey to inform his stepmother that her husband — Mr. Iqbal’s father — had died of a stroke in Pakistan.

He fell in with members of the Islamic Defenders Front, according to his statement to the combatant status review tribunal at Guantánamo in 2004. The group is an Indonesian urban-based organization. It is not banned in Indonesia and has not been connected to any terrorist attacks.

Senate Report Blames Rumsfeld for Detainee Abuses

By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
Published: December 11, 2008

WASHINGTON — A report released Thursday by leaders of the Senate Armed Services committee said that top Bush administration officials, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, bear major responsibility for the abuses committed by American troops in interrogations at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other military detention centers.

The report was issued jointly by Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the Democratic chairman of the panel, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the top Republican. The report represents most thorough review by Congress to date of the origins of the abuse of prisoners in American military custody, and it explicitly rejects the Bush administration’s contention that tough interrogation methods have helped keep the country and its troops safe.

The report also rejected previous claims by Mr. Rumsfeld and others that Defense Department policies played no role in the the harsh treatment of prisoners at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 and in other incidents of abuse.

The abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib, the report says, “was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own” but grew out of interrogation policies approved by Mr. Rumsfeld and other top officials “conveyed the message that physical pressures and degradation were appropriate treatment for detainees.”

By the time of the abuses at Abu Ghraib, Mr. Rumsfeld had formally withdrawn approval for use of the harshest techniques, which he authorized in December 2002 and then ruled out a month later. But the report said that those methods, including the use of stress positions and forced nudity, continued to spread through the military detention system. It added that their use “damaged our ability to collect accurate intelligence that could save lives, strengthened the hand of our enemies, and compromised our moral authority.”

Most of the report, the product of an 18-month inquiry and interviews of more than 70 people by committee staff, remains classified. But the 29-page summary offers the clearest timeline to date linking the acts of Pentagon officials, including William J. Haynes II, the former Defense Department general counsel, to abusive treatment in the field.

Committee staff members said the report was approved by a voice vote without dissent, but only 17 of the committee’s 25 members were present for the vote. Mr. McCain, who was tortured while being held as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam, has been an outspoken opponent of harsh interrogation tactics, but some other Republicans have defended such methods as legal and necessary.

Most of the facts in the report summary have been previously made public, notably at hearings the Senate committee held in June and September. But the report documents how the military training program called Surveillance, Evasion, Resistance and Escape, or SERE, became a major source for interrogation methods as the Bush administration looked for tougher methods after the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The SERE training was based on methods used by “a ruthless, lawless enemy,” Mr. Levin said in a statement. “The techniques were never intended to be used against detainees in U.S. custody,” he said.

Mr. McCain called the adoption of SERE methods “inexcusable.”

“These policies are wrong and must never be repeated,” said Mr. McCain, who led the successful fight in Congress in 2005 to prohibit military interrogators from using coercive methods.

I know that wasn't a very mature or eloquent response expressed in the headline, but it was necessary to get out:

Bush Chooses to Keep Guantánamo Open, Officials Say
--Stephen Lee Myers

WASHINGTON: Despite his stated desire to close the U.S. prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President George W. Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

Bush's top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House over the summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or anytime soon, they said.

Click here to read the full text of the International Herald Tribune article. Both the McCain & Obama camps have declined to comment on this news as of today, but their stances thus far on Gitmo are displayed below:

McCain has suggested moving the detainees to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, home of the U.S. Army's prison. His remarks prompted a public letter in June from the two Republican senators from Kansas, Sam Brownback and Pat Roberts, objecting to the idea on a variety of grounds, mostly involving security. McCain's campaign did not respond to repeated requests for comments about plans for Guantánamo.

Obama's declined to comment specifically, but his platform promises to abolish military tribunals and conduct a review to determine which prisoners to prosecute, which to hold under the laws of war and which to release. His proposal does not specify where detainees would be held before or after that review.

Click here to join Amnesty International and strengthen the message to Tear It Down - Let's Counter Terror with Justice.

Waterboarding Got the White House Nod - Joby Warrick, The Washington Post:

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first -- and, for years, the only -- tangible expressions of the administration's consent for the CIA's use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for "policy approval."

Click here
to read the rest..

Convinced that key evidence was being withheld from the defense, Lt. Col. Darrel J. Vandeveld went from being a 'true believer to someone who felt truly deceived' by the tribunals.

From Josh Meyer at the Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON -- Darrel J. Vandeveld was in despair. The hard-nosed lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve, a self-described conformist praised by his superiors for his bravery in Iraq, had lost faith in the Guantanamo Bay war crimes tribunals in which he was a prosecutor.

His work was top secret, making it impossible to talk to family or friends. So the devout Catholic -- working away from home -- contacted a priest online.

Even if he had no doubt about the guilt of the accused, he wrote in an August e-mail, "I am beginning to have grave misgivings about what I am doing, and what we are doing as a country. .

"I no longer want to participate in the system, but I lack the courage to quit. I am married, with children, and not only will they suffer, I'll lose a lot of friends."

Two days later, he took the unusual step of reaching out for advice from his opposing counsel, a military defense lawyer.

"How do I get myself out of this office?" Vandeveld asked Major David J.R. Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, who represented the young Afghan Vandeveld was prosecuting for an attack on U.S. soldiers -- despite Vandeveld's doubts about whether Mohammed Jawad would get a fair trial. Vandeveld said he was seeking a "practical way of extricating myself from this mess."

Last month, Vandeveld did just that, resigning from the Jawad case, the military commissions overall and, ultimately, active military duty. In doing so, he has become even more of a central figure in the "mess" he considers Guantanamo to be.

Vandeveld is at least the fourth prosecutor to resign under protest. Questions about the fairness of the tribunals have been raised by the very people charged with conducting them, according to legal experts, human rights observers and current and former military officials.

Vandeveld's claims are particularly explosive.

From New York Times Guantanamo specialist William Glaberson, providing a little insight on the highly complicated case and journey of Salim Ahmed Hamdan:

GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — A panel of six military officers convicted a former driver for Osama bin Laden of a war crime Wednesday, completing the first military commission trial here and the first conducted by the United States since the end of World War II.

But the commission acquitted the former driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, of a conspiracy charge, arguably the more serious of two charges he faced. His conviction came on a separate but lesser charge of providing material support for terrorism.

UPDATE: Hamdan Speaks at Sentence Hearing

From the New York Times comes the news of a landmark decision in the case of Boumediene v. Bush. The ruling does leave some issues unresolved, but nonetheless proclaims and reaffirms a foreign detainee's right to habeas corpus and finally strikes down that provision of the MCA as unconstitutional:

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Thursday delivered its third consecutive rebuff to the Bush administration’s handling of the detainees at Guantánamo Bay, ruling 5 to 4 that the prisoners there have a constitutional right to go to federal court to challenge their continued detention.

The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that Guantánamo inmates could use the federal courts.

The court declared unconstitutional a provision of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 that, at the administration’s behest, stripped the federal courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas corpus petitions from the detainees seeking to challenge their designation as enemy combatants.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the truncated review procedure provided by a previous law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, “falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute” because it failed to offer “the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus.”

The BBC has published a brief Q&A about waterboarding on their news website. It is a concise overview of the Bush administration's policies and procedures. In response to the question of whether or not waterboarding is effective, BBC references the case of Al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubayda.

According to ex-CIA officer John Kiriakou, al-Qaeda suspect Abu Zubaydah "broke" within half a minute. Abu Zubaydah said later that he had made things up to satisfy his interrogators.

A Yemeni man, Khaled al-Maqtari was reportedly held in CIA prisons known as 'black sites' for more than 2 years. He was arrested in 2004 in Falluja, Iraq on the suspicion of being an insurgent.

Although Bush banned "cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment" of terrorist suspects in 2007, he has also admitted previously to the existence of black sites (in Eastern Europe) and the CIA has not remarked on the issue.

Amnesty International has apparently been in contact with al-Maqtari and the organization has noted the existence of flight records which may correspond with the dates he would have been transferred. Amnesty also reports his claims of torture while in the jail.

read about the torture on BBC news:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7292974.stm

New news about legislation:
The House of Representatives failed to overturn Bush's veto of the bill which would ban the CIA from using "specialized interrogation procedures". These include waterboarding, sleep deprivation, and other harsh measures. A 225-188 vote wasn't the 2/3 needed to overturn the veto. White House press secretary Perino spun the decision nicely, appealing to the public fear of terrorism. According to Ms. Perino, an overturn

would have diminished the intelligence community's ability to protect our nation

The CIA has claimed to use waterboarding on only 3 people. If these procedures do in fact protect our nation, we must be using plenty of other equally inhumane methods.

In a move that many expected but hoped would not happen, Bush has resolutely used his executive power in his few remaining months to veto a recently Congressionally-approved bill that would have prohibited waterboarding and other harsh CIA interrogation techniques.

Amnesty International has an action letter already drafted, if you wish to write to your local newspaper or senator protesting Bush's measure (but be sure to commend the Senate on theirs!): Click here to write an action letter.

You can also read the full New York Times article/review of the decision and its implications here: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/washington/09policy.html?ref=washington

US Rejects Race Link to Rendition
Associated Press

GENEVA (AP) -- The United States on Friday rejected any link between racial discrimination and the U.S. practice of sending terrorism suspects to countries where they may be tortured.

''Anything that would be done in this area would not be done on the basis of racial discrimination,'' Robert Harris, assistant legal adviser with the Department of State, told a U.N. panel on racism.

The independent experts on the U.N. Committee on the Elimination of Racism told Harris and other members of the U.S. delegation that they had received claims that American authorities were being racist in the way they are conducting the so-called war on terror.

Countries ''should ensure that non-citizens detained or arrested in the fight against terrorism are properly protected by domestic law that complies with international human rights,'' said Morten Kjaerum, a Danish member of the panel.

''It seems there is a problem in relation to those who are being involved in the rendition program,'' said Kjaerum. He referred to ''extraordinary rendition'' the expression used by the U.S. for such transport of terror suspects.

''The moment the U.S. authorities take into custody a person wherever in the world, you have the responsibility for this person,'' he added.

A day after the Senate voted to expand the executive branch's spy powers EVEN MORE and irritated me to no end, they are in my good graces again after their decision today to ban waterboarding and other harsh interrogation techniques used by the CIA...albeit with a very slim majority. Of course, the entire world is fairly sure Bush will just veto the bill, but I think we can take any small victory at this point.

Find the full New York Times article here: Senate Passes Interrogation Ban

UPDATE: U.S. Said to Seek Death Penalty for the 6 Detainees

Read: the Bush administration's rush to enact their ultimate reforms officially sets in...

From William Glaberson, the New York Times main columnist on issues in Guantanamo:

Military prosecutors are in the final phases of preparing the first sweeping case against suspected conspirators in the plot that led to the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans on Sept. 11, 2001, and drew the United States into war, people who have been briefed on the case said.

The charges, to be filed in the military commission system at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, would involve as many as six detainees held at the detention camp, including Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the former senior aide to Osama bin Laden, who has said he was the principal planner of the plot.

The case could begin to fulfill a longtime goal of the Bush administration: establishing culpability for the terrorist attacks of 2001. It could also help the administration make its case that some detainees at Guantánamo, where 275 men remain, would pose a threat if they are not held at Guantánamo or elsewhere. Officials have long said that a half-dozen men held at Guantánamo played essential roles in the plot directed by Mr. Mohammed, from would-be hijackers to financiers.

In other news outside of our country's Guantanamo debacle, the state of Nebraska has finally forbidden the use of the electric chair. At this point, Nebraska was the only state to rely on electrocution as the sole method of execution for the death penalty, so this essentially suspends any potential executions in the state in the near future -- mostly because of an ongoing debate in the Supreme Court over the three-chemical combination in a typical lethal injection, which is known to cause extreme pain.

Nebraska's Supreme Court did thankfully rule that electrocution was cruel and unusual punishment, saying that it causes “unnecessary pain, suffering and torture.” But they are also, of course, looking for "new methods" of execution, so, as a person who is avidly against the death penalty, I'm not quite sure what to make of their "progress" just yet. It is interesting to note that last year, Nebraska's unicameral legislature was one vote away from abolishing the death penalty entirely in their state...

...and Cheney gives his two cents worth.

CIA director Michael Hayden also jumps in and relates the idea that "waterboarding is necessary though probably not legal..." (?) My goodness. The CIA recently officially admitted to having used waterboarding as an interrogation technique for three terrorism suspects, but claims that the technique has not been used since 2003. Attorney General Mukasey, as a result, has flatly stated that he does NOT plan to launch a criminal investigation into the CIA's use of waterboarding.....

Many of you are probably familiar with the debate that raged on in the Senate last year concerning now Attorney General Michael Mukasey's remarks on waterboarding practices and whether or not they qualified as torture....it appears that he is still hedging on this point. Some of the remarks he makes frankly disgust me, but, well, we'll see what happens. For more information on waterboarding, please see our Amnesty group's research on the issue, and the statement below from Human Rights Watch gives a more literal picture:

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.

According to the sources, CIA officers who subjected themselves to the water boarding technique lasted an average of 14 seconds before caving in. They said al Qaeda's toughest prisoner, Khalid Sheik Mohammed, won the admiration of interrogators when he was able to last between two and two-and-a-half minutes before begging to confess.

"The person believes they are being killed, and as such, it really amounts to a mock execution, which is illegal under international law," said John Sifton of Human Rights Watch.

Article from the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey said Tuesday that the harsh C.I.A. interrogation technique known as waterboarding was not clearly illegal, and suggested that it could be used against terrorism suspects once again if requested by the White House.

Mr. Mukasey’s statement came in a letter delivered Tuesday night to the Senate Judiciary Committee, which has scheduled for Wednesday its first oversight hearing for the new attorney general. The conclusions of the letter are likely to be a focus of severe questioning by Senate Democrats who have described waterboarding, which creates the sensation of drowning, as torture.

The verdict on the Jose Padilla case has arrived - 17 years and 4 months in prison for his conspiracy case. Because he was not handed a life sentence, the verdict has been called a "setback" for the Bush administration....although in any respect, it is a grave and debatably unfounded legal result for a case in which even presiding Judge Marcia G. Cooke admitted that there was no evidence linking Mr. Padilla and two co-defendants to specific terrorism acts anywhere...

“There is no evidence that these defendants personally maimed, kidnapped or killed anyone in the United States or elsewhere,” Judge Cooke said. “There was never a plot to overthrow the United States government.”

Read the full New York Times article for a review of the decision, including a history of Padilla's "enemy combatant" case and the alleged torture he endured during interrogation.

From the New York Times..William Glaberson's "From a Critic of Tribunals to Top Judge"

This should be enough of a hook:

Back in 2002, a master’s degree candidate at the Naval War College wrote a paper on the Bush administration’s plan to use military commissions to try Guantánamo suspects, concluding that “even a good military tribunal is a bad idea.”

It drew little notice at the time, but the paper has gained a second life because of its author’s big promotion: Col. Ralph H. Kohlmann of the Marines is now the chief judge of the military commissions at the naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

Washington officials have revealed to the New York Times that a series of classified, undisclosed documents from the U.S. Justice Department details their "secret" endorsement of severe, torture-laden interrogation techniques used by the CIA. As the Times reports, in early 2005 (shortly after former attorney general Alberto Gonzales assumed his duties), the Justice Department issued a secret legal opinion that was essentially "an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency." This was in stark contrast to the opinion the department issued only a couple months earlier, where they publicly denounced the use of torture as "abhorrent."

However, as officials report, the newly revealed secret opinion "explicit[ly]" authorizes and allows "a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures" to be used in interrogating terror suspects. Then, of course, comes the kicker. From The Times:

Later that year, as Congress moved toward outlawing “cruel, inhuman and degrading” treatment, the Justice Department issued another secret opinion, one most lawmakers did not know existed, current and former officials said. The Justice Department document declared that none of the C.I.A. interrogation methods violated that standard.

Although the Supreme Court has repeatedly attempted to impose limits on interrogation tactics, and the Bush administration has reportedly renounced their most extreme techniques, the disturbing fact remains that this 2005 secret opinion is actually still in effect, and reaffirmed by several subsequent, recent legal memorandums.

The Times staff interviewed about 24 current and former counterterrorism officials over three months as they gathered more information about this secret authorization; the article also provides a good history of the U.S.'s legal struggle over interrogation techniques and revelations of torture since the Bush administration started detaining suspects post-September 11th. With this latest eruption of secret documents, there is now a renewed debate in Congress, as they demand that the documents be disclosed.

UPDATE: President Bush's response to the chaos erupting in Congress (from the Times): "Bush Defends Interrogations, Saying Methods Aren't Torture."

Ex-U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has been appointed as a "distinguished visiting fellow" at the Hoover Institution, as stated in the Stanford Report. There have already been quite a few strong reactions on and off campus to news of the appointment, with everything ranging from skepticism to anger. Many students and faculty members are disappointed that Stanford would honor a man who many believe completely mis-handled the war in Iraq, has been accused repeatedly of allowing torture and disastrous human rights abuses to occur in the process, a la Abu Ghraib, and has made remarks that characterize critics of the war as unpatriotic.

Students and faculty are currently circulating an online petition objecting to the Rumsfeld appointment for these reasons, amongst others. If you wish to sign, you can read and sign the petition here.

Dr. Angela Hegarty, director of forensic psychiatry at the Creedmoor Psychiatric Center in Queens, N.Y., spent 22 hours with Padilla, evaluating the state of his mental health. She determined that the interrogation techniques that were used against him had destroyed his mind.

Amy Goodman (who is coming to Stanford) interviewed Dr. Hegarty regarding her session with Padilla. The following is a portion of this interview.

Goodman: What was the effect of over three-and-a-half years of isolation on Jose Padilla?

Dr. Hegarty: I think there's two things, really. Number one, his family, more than anything, and his friends, who had a chance to see him by the time I spoke with them, said he was changed. There was something wrong. There was something very "weird" -- was the word one of his siblings used -- something weird about him. There was something not right. He was a different man. And the second thing was his absolute state of terror, terror alternating with numbness, largely. It was as though the interrogators were in the room with us. He was like -- perhaps like a trauma victim who knew that they were going to be sent back to the person who hurt them and that he would, as I said earlier, he would subsequently pay a price if he revealed what happened. So I think those would be the two main things.

"Also he had developed, actually, a third thing. He had developed really a tremendous identification with the goals and interests of the government. I really considered a diagnosis of Stockholm syndrome. For example, at one point in the proceedings, his attorneys had, you know, done well at cross-examining an FBI agent, and instead of feeling happy about it like all the other defendants I've seen over the years, he was actually very angry with them. He was very angry that the civil proceedings were "unfair to the commander-in-chief," quote/unquote. And in fact, one of the things that happened that disturbed me particularly was when he saw his mother. He wanted her to contact President Bush to help him, help him out of his dilemma. He expected that the government might help him, if he was "good," quote/unquote."

Today, a federal jury in Miami found designated "enemy combatant" Jose Padilla guilty of multiple terrorism and conspiracy charges. For an embittered case that has gone on for quite a few years (Padilla was one of the first Americans to be declared an "enemy combatant" by the Bush administration in the immediate aftermath of the September 11th attacks), the jury spent fairly little time in deliberation before convicting Padilla - just under a day, according to the New York Times article reviewing the decision.

Much of the controversy surrounding Padilla's case concerns his rights as an American citizen vs. his (lack of) rights as an enemy combatant. In addition, his lawyers have argued that Padilla should not have been fit to stand trial, as Padilla has asserted that he was tortured when held in isolation in a military brig in South Carolina for three years (also, without any access to a lawyer.) Padilla claims he was excessively deprived of sleep and almost any stimulus while in the brig, but the government has repeatedly denied that they mistreated and/or abused Padilla.

Human Rights Watch gives a good legal summary of Padilla's case and its excessive entanglements. What seems upsetting and disturbing is that despite these complications, the jury was fairly resolute in their decision, and the notion of Padilla's alleged torture has been ambiguously left up in the air (or, rather, swept aside). His lawyers are concerned that suspicion and fear may have overruled what they believe is lack of "hard evidence" in the jury's decision.

Yesterday I saw the following headline on the BBC website: "Guantanamo Saudi 'kills himself'"- the article reports that there are currently 380 prisoners there and that some of them have been held for 5 years. This inmate has not been the first to commit suicide, and he likely will not be the last, as long as the detainees are held indefinately without any of their basic rights, including the right to be charged with a crime, to hear the charges against them, to see the evidence against them, to refute the evidence against them, and the right to an attorney.

I forwarded this article to the Stanford Amnesty list, and received a response that brings up some important questions:

The questions that were asked are:
1. Should the prison camp be closed down?
2. If so, where should the prisoners go?
3. Do you think any of them are probably guilty of fighting a war against us?

I replied with the a rather long email...

From today's New York Times:

A new, long-term hunger strike has broken out at the American detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, with more than a dozen detainees subjecting themselves to daily force-feeding to protest their treatment, military officials and lawyers for the detainees said.

Lawyers for several hunger strikers said their clients’ action were driven by harsh conditions in a new maximum security complex to which about 160 prisoners have been moved since December.

In 1971, while in Lefortovo prison in Moscow (the central KGB interrogation jail), I went on a hunger strike demanding a defense lawyer of my choice (the KGB wanted its trusted lawyer to be assigned instead). The moment was most inconvenient for my captors because my case was due in court, and they had no time to spare. So, to break me down, they started force-feeding me in a very unusual manner -- through my nostrils. About a dozen guards led me from my cell to the medical unit. There they straitjacketed me, tied me to a bed, and sat on my legs so that I would not jerk. The others held my shoulders and my head while a doctor was pushing the feeding tube into my nostril.

The feeding pipe was thick, thicker than my nostril, and would not go in. Blood came gushing out of my nose and tears down my cheeks, but they kept pushing until the cartilages cracked. I guess I would have screamed if I could, but I could not with the pipe in my throat. I could breathe neither in nor out at first; I wheezed like a drowning man -- my lungs felt ready to burst. The doctor also seemed ready to burst into tears, but she kept shoving the pipe farther and farther down. Only when it reached my stomach could I resume breathing, carefully. Then she poured some slop through a funnel into the pipe that would choke me if it came back up. They held me down for another half-hour so that the liquid was absorbed by my stomach and could not be vomited back, and then began to pull the pipe out bit by bit. . . . Grrrr. There had just been time for everything to start healing during the night when they came back in the morning and did it all over again, for 10 days, when the guards could stand it no longer. As it happened, it was a Sunday and no bosses were around. They surrounded the doctor: "Hey, listen, let him drink it straight from the bowl, let him sip it. It'll be quicker for you, too, you silly old fool." The doctor was in tears: "Do you think I want to go to jail because of you lot? No, I can't do that. . . . " And so they stood over my body, cursing each other, with bloody bubbles coming out of my nose. On the 12th day, the authorities surrendered; they had run out of time. I had gotten my lawyer, but neither the doctor nor those guards could ever look me in the eye again.

After appearing on the Daily Show last night, today, retired Stanford professor Phil Zimbardo appeared on the radio show "Democracy Now!" to publicize his new book, The Lucifer Effect. Click here to download the show's MP3 or here to watch the segment in Real Player.

As the United States enters the fifth year of its occupation of Iraq, some of the most enduring images of the war remain the vivid photographs of US soldiers torturing Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib. The pictures were leaked to the press and first revealed to the world in May 2004. Images showed Iraqis with bags over their heads, beaten, set upon by dogs and forced into sexually humiliating acts. The Bush administration tried to paint the scandal as an isolated incident committed by rogue soldiers. But who is really to blame for the abuses at Abu Ghraib? The answer may lie in a landmark study conducted more than three decades ago.

In 1971, psychology professor Philip Zimbardo created an experiment at Stanford University in which 24 male college students were randomly assigned the roles of prison guards and prisoners at a makeshift jail on campus. The experiment was scheduled to run for two weeks. By Day Two, the guards were going far beyond keeping the prisoners behind bars. In scenes eerily similar to Abu Ghraib, prisoners were stripped naked, bags put on their heads and sexually humiliated. The guards had become dangerously sadistic and the prisoners were breaking down emotionally. The two-week experiment had to be canceled after just six days.

Professor Philip Zimbardo has just written a new book that, for the first time, tells the full story of the famed Stanford Prison Experiment. It's called "The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil." Professor Zimbardo joins me today from our firehouse studio in New York.

Human Rights Journalism
Spring 2007 / Communication 177K/277K / MW, 10-11:50 a.m.
Room 59, McClatchy Hall (Building 120)

Glenn Frankel, Hearst Professional in Residence
frankelg at stanford.edu

Glenn Frankel is a former Washington Post foreign correspondent who has served as bureau chief for Southern Africa, Jerusalem and London and who won a Pulitzer Prize in foreign reporting for his coverage of the first Palestinian uprising.

The first half of the course will examine a number of case studies from the past 30 years such as El Salvador, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Rwanda, Bosnia, Sudan and Israel, and the second half will focus on American human rights abuses since 9/11.

Course Description:

This is the Age of Human Rights. Since World War Two, we’ve seen the rise of the concept of universal rights and the growth of a global movement dedicated to the cause. Governments have signed treaties and conventions committing themselves to opposing genocide, torture and other crimes against humanity. At the same time, nation-states have jealously guarded their own sovereignty, cracked down whenever threatened and ignored outbreaks of genocide, while superpowers like the United States have forged alliances with despots of many stripes. The distance between what governments have pledged on human rights and what they actually do is a gaping chasm. It’s here---in the gray zone between ambiguity and hypocrisy---that journalism lives.

COLIN FREEZE
From Saturday's Globe and Mail

On a chilly Minnesota night in 2004, FBI agents invited an immigrant truck driver to step out of the April air and warm up in a waiting car. They proceeded to bring him in for questioning, telling him they knew he'd served as a mujahedeen sniper in Afghanistan.

For the Americans, the probe seems never-ending. Mr. Arar, 36, remains on the U.S. watch list, for reasons never publicly explained.

This excellent editorial from the New York Times today is a great summary of what we must do to restore America's commitment to human rights five years after 9/11:

Five years of presidential overreaching and Congressional collaboration continue to exact a high toll in human lives, America’s global reputation and the architecture of democracy. Brutality toward prisoners, and the denial of their human rights, have been institutionalized; unlawful spying on Americans continues; and the courts are being closed to legal challenges of these practices.

Today we’re offering a list — which, sadly, is hardly exhaustive — of things that need to be done to reverse the unwise and lawless policies of President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Ban Torture, Really
The provisions in the Military Commissions Act that Senator McCain trumpeted as a ban on torture are hardly that. It is still largely up to the president to decide what constitutes torture and abuse for the purpose of prosecuting anyone who breaks the rules. This amounts to rewriting the Geneva Conventions and puts every American soldier at far greater risk if captured. It allows the president to decide in secret what kinds of treatment he will permit at the Central Intelligence Agency’s prisons. The law absolves American intelligence agents and their bosses of any acts of torture and abuse they have already committed.

Hey, how'd that get there? Nice work, team.

The Road to Guantanamo
Tuesday, March 6th at 7:30PM
Language Corner (260-113)

Sen. Chris Dodd (Democrat, CN) is proposing a new bill that would allow all people in U.S. custody to file for a writ of habeas corpus. The bill is called Restoring the Constitution Act of 2007, and it also restricts the definition of enemy combatant. You can sign on to become a citizen co-sponsor here.

This week in Miami, federal Judge Marcia Cooke is trying to determine
whether alleged terror conspirator Jose Padilla is mentally fit to stand trial. Having been repeatedly denied a writ of habeas corpus, Padilla was held for 1,307 days in a 9' by 7' cell in a Navy brig in South Carolina, where he was deprived of sleep, light, sight, sound, and isolated for extended periods of time. Among other things, Padilla claims he was also shackled in stress positions and administered drugs.

Padilla's story is very sad, but it's important to keep an eye on his trial. Here's a passage from Dahlia Lithwick's piece in Slate magazine, where she argues that Padilla's case demonstrates the futility of torture...

"The Ghosts of Abu Ghraib" is the first documentary to feature both Iraqi victims and guards directly involved in torture at the prison. It was created by critically-acclaimed filmmaker Rory Kennedy and premiers tomorrow, Thursday, at 9:30PM on HBO. If you miss it, check HBO's re-broadcast schedule.

Read the New York Times review here.

A judicial panel ruled today that hundreds of foreign nationals detained in Guantanamo Bay do not have the right to challenge their indefinite imprisonment in the U.S. court system. Expect to see this issue in the Supreme Court soon.