CIA Torture Jets: More controversial in UK than Ireland?

by Eoin Dubsky Tue Feb 22, 2005 16:50

Feb 28th Issue of Newsweek: Aboard Air CIA

The agency ran a secret charter service, shuttling detainees to interrogation facilities worldwide. Was it legal? What's next? A NEWSWEEK investigation

by redjade Sun Feb 20, 2005 12:26

Time for an Accounting
NY Times Editorial
February 19, 2005

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/19/opinion/19sat1.html?ex=1266555600&en=aeeb8bee2a5828cb&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

Of all the claims of an electoral mandate made by President Bush's supporters, none were as bizarre as the one offered by John Yoo, a former Justice Department lawyer who helped draft the cynical justifications for the illegal detention and torture of "unlawful combatants." "The debate is over," Mr. Yoo told The New Yorker, adding: "The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum."

It's hard to know what is most outrageous about those comments - that Mr. Yoo actually believes Americans voted for torturing prisoners or that an official at the heart of this appalling mess feels secure enough to say that. Certainly the worst possibility is that the public has, indeed, lost interest.

[....]

American intelligence is still secretly detaining prisoners - a practice that has become embarrassing enough for the Central Intelligence Agency to fret publicly about it. And the administration continues to insist that the president has an imperial right to sweep aside the law and authorize whatever he wants. That includes flouting treaties that prohibit sending prisoners to other countries to be tortured. That abhorrent practice has become more common since 9/11 and is reported to include sending prisoners to Syria, a repressive nation counted by Washington as a state sponsor of terrorism.

Members of Congress from both parties are proposing new laws on interrogations. Their intentions are honorable, and new legislation may be needed. But drafts of these measures risk endorsing some terrible practices, as well as the idea that the president can declare himself above the law. Anyway, it's too soon for new laws; we still don't know what happened and who approved it.

by Reality Check Wed Feb 16, 2005 13:32

Where is Portugal on the way to?
It kind of depends which way you're travelling to?
If you were going North, it's on the way to Ireland. If you were going South, it could be on the way to the Canary Islands. If you were going West, it would be on the way to America or even Japan. Whereas if you were going East, it would be Spain.
You could also be heading North East, North North East or towards any given point on the entire planet.

by Phyllis Tue Feb 15, 2005 19:42

at Frankfurt Airport. Details shown on the link. Hobby spotters recorded it being seen at Frankfurt Rhein-Main airport on 6-December-2003, 2-May-2003, 8-July-2002, and at OPO Porto (Oporto) [Francisco Sa Carneiro (Pedras Rubras)], airport in Portugal in May 2002 also. (Where is Portugal on the way to??) This detail is from http://www.planepictures.net/netsearch4.cgi?srch=N379P&srng=2&stype=reg

by redjade Mon Feb 14, 2005 16:57

Military lawyers at the Guantanamo Bay terrorist prison tried to stop inhumane interrogations, but were ignored by senior Pentagon officials, The New York Daily News has learned.

Judge advocates - uniformed legal advisers known as JAGs who were assigned to a secret war crimes task force - repeatedly objected to aggressive interrogations by a separate intelligence unit at Camp Delta, where Taliban and al-Qaida suspects have been jailed since January 2002.

But Pentagon officials "didn't think this was a big deal, so they just ignored the JAGs," a senior military source said.

[....]

An Air Force colonel with the war crimes task force told a superior he was "aghast" at the harsher techniques. Long interrogations and isolation had been effective, a senior former officer said. And Miller dismissed the concerns of the judge advocates who were persuaded the interrogation policies violated the law, sources said.

http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/politics/10889627.htm?1c

by redjade Sat Feb 12, 2005 21:51

More from:
Outsourcing Torture
By Jane Mayer
http://newyorker.com/printable/?fact/050214fa_fact6

Most of these documents were generated by a small, hawkish group of politically appointed lawyers in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and in the office of Alberto Gonzales, the White House counsel. Chief among the authors was John C. Yoo, the deputy assistant attorney general at the time.

[....]

As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”

by redjade Sat Feb 12, 2005 19:27

As a physician holding the title of brigadier general by the time I retired in 1998, I directed major medical support efforts during the 1991 Gulf War and have seen the Army leadership up close. So, as the scandals at Abu Ghraib in Iraq and Guantanamo in Cuba unfolded, I wondered why we had heard so little from the medics. When faced with the twin pressures of performing their military duty and providing treatment, did the staffs at these facilities turn a blind eye to the physical and mental torture inflicted on the prisoners, or perhaps even collude with interrogators? There are few other explanations for why they didn't report suspicious findings from the examinations of the detainees. Unless, of course, those reports were suppressed.

I've also wondered whether the senior medical leadership of the Army, Navy and Air Force knew of the abuses — and whether their reports could have been concealed.

[....]

With disturbing   echoes of unsavory regimes in history, medics abdicated their responsibilities toward the detainees, their patients, instead of making interrogations more humane, more in keeping with international standards of decency.

Unlike soldiers, doctors have a duty to patients as well as country. That is what separates U.S. military physicians from the German doctors who aided the Nazis in concentration camps or, in perhaps a closer parallel, the South African prison doctors who examined anti-apartheid leader Steve Biko (a fellow physician no less), filed incomplete reports, deferred to police interrogators and failed to stop the brutal treatment that ended in Biko's death.

--
Stephen N. Xenakis, a retired brigadier general with the U.S. Army, now works as a child and adolescent psychiatrist at the Psychiatric Institute of Washington.

by redjade Sat Feb 12, 2005 15:19

British Show Explores “Guantanamo Tactics”

As a US military investigation indicated that sexually-oriented tactics were part of interrogation methods used against detainees in the Guantanamo Bay, a British TV channel is preparing a “reality show” that seeks to test the effectiveness of the torture methods used against detainees in notorious US-administrated detention camps in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Guantanamo Guidebook”, set to be broadcast on Channel 4 by the end of February, films seven British volunteers -– three Muslims and four white Britons –- locked up in a makeshift detention center at a warehouse in east London as they are subjected for over a period of 48 hours to a range of torture techniques known to be used at the Guantanamo Bay by US interrogation experts, Reuters said.

http://www.islamonline.org/English/News/2005-02/10/article04.shtml

--- ---

→ other links:
http://www.channel4.com/

→ This independent business called 'Team Delta' is assisting Channel Four in the production of 'Guantanamo Guidebook' http://www.teamdelta.net/

→ on their website:
'Team Delta's Cadre recreates the Guantanamo Bay interrogation experience -  putting seven volunteers including three Muslims, through an actual military interrogation, using the rules of engagement approved by Secretary of State Rumsfeld for Guantanamo Bay.'

Image from the 'Team Delta' website

by redjade Sat Feb 12, 2005 14:46

Torture, American Style
Bob Herbert

Any rights Mr. Arar might have thought he had, either as a Canadian citizen or a human being, had been left behind. At times during the trip, Mr. Arar heard the pilots and crew identify themselves in radio communications as members of "the Special Removal Unit." He was being taken, on the orders of the U.S. government, to Syria, where he would be tortured.

[....]

This is one of the great euphemisms of our time. Extraordinary rendition is the name that's been given to the policy of seizing individuals without even the semblance of due process and sending them off to be interrogated by regimes known to practice torture. In terms of bad behavior, it stands side by side with contract killings.

Our henchmen in places like Syria, Egypt, Morocco, Uzbekistan and Jordan are torturing terror suspects at the behest of a nation - the United States - that just went through a national election in which the issue of moral values was supposed to have been decisive. How in the world did we become a country in which gays' getting married is considered an abomination, but torture is O.K.?

[....]

Any government that commits, condones, promotes or fosters torture is a malignant force in the world. And those who refuse to raise their voices against something as clearly evil as torture are enablers, if not collaborators.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/02/11/opinion/11herbert.html?ex=1265864400&en=aee92600faf6bde2&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland

by redjade Fri Feb 11, 2005 15:53

Outsourcing Torture
By Jane Mayer
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?050214fa_fact6

The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program.

[Maher Arar, a Canadian engineer who was born in Syria] is suing the U.S. government for his mistreatment. “They are outsourcing torture because they know it’s illegal,” he said. “Why, if they have suspicions, don’t they question people within the boundary of the law?”

Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis, but after September 11th, when President Bush declared a global war on terrorism, the program expanded beyond recognition—becoming, according to a former C.I.A. official, “an abomination.”

[....]

Although the full scope of the extraordinary-rendition program isn’t known, several recent cases have come to light that may well violate U.S. law. In 1998, Congress passed legislation declaring that it is “the policy of the United States not to expel, extradite, or otherwise effect the involuntary return of any person to a country in which there are substantial grounds for believing the person would be in danger of being subjected to torture, regardless of whether the person is physically present in the United States.”

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Torture by Proxy
Q & A w/ Jane Mayer
http://newyorker.com/online/content/?050214on_onlineonly01

Question: I understand that there have been some developments in that case since your story went to press.

Jane Mayer: Yes. I wrote in my piece that one of the men alleged that two of his fingers had been broken by U.S. soldiers at Guantánamo. On Friday, just after we went to press, the Pentagon agreed to declassify an account by the detainee, making the details of his story, and his name, Mustafa Ait Idir, public for the first time.

-- -- -- -- --

Download the newly declassified Documents...

http://newyorker.com/online/content/?050214on_onlineonly02