“If the Detainee Dies, You’re Doing it Wrong”

When former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved the use of harsh techniques, he did so over the objections of senior military attorneys from all branches of the armed services. Before the Senate Armed Services Committee, key players in the drama that led to the use of torture in Guantanamo answered questions.

Over the objections of senior lawyers across the military, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, acting on the advice of Department of Defense General Counsel William “Jim” Haynes, approved the use of 15 harsh interrogation techniques requested by officials at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to be used on alleged “enemy combatants.”

Rumsfeld’s December 2, 2002, decision has been widely reported, but the fact that the techniques he approved were heavily questioned just one month earlier — including by senior military officials in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines — was revealed at a Tuesday hearing before the Senate Armed Services committee.

“While it has been known for some time that military lawyers voiced strong objections to interrogation techniques in early 2003,” said committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., “these November 2002 warnings from the military services — expressed before the Secretary of Defense authorized the use of aggressive techniques — were not publicly known before now.”

At the hearing, former defense officials, including Haynes and Richard Shiffrin, former deputy general counsel for intelligence, as well as retired Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Baumgartner, faced tough questioning from Democratic members of the panel about their roles in institutionalizing those very techniques. According to documents distributed by the committee, Shiffrin, acting on Haynes’ behalf in 2002, called upon Baumgartner to provide defense attorneys with a list of harsh interrogation methods — specifically, methods deployed against American soldiers during training to prepare them for the possibility that they may one day be captured by a torturing regime. Both Shiffrin and Baumgartner denied knowing that the information they provided to Haynes would be used as the basis for detainee interrogations in three countries. Haynes said he could not recall the details of his role in the process.

Also testifying on Tuesday was retired Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, who in October 2002 penned a legal opinion in which she “concluded that certain aggressive interrogation techniques…were lawful.” “I have been vilified by some because of it,” she told the panel, “and discounted and forgotten by many others.”

Under questioning from Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., about the legal soundness of her memo, Beaver, whose writings greenlighted the use of techniques like waterboarding and sleep deprivation, demurred. “If I asked you if the UCMJ [Uniform Code of Military Justice] prohibited waterboarding, what would you say?” asked Graham, a former attorney for the Judge Advocate General of the Air Force. “It’s difficult to say,” Beaver responded.

In that memo, though, Beaver writes that, in order to circumvent various legal prohibitions to techniques like waterboarding, “[i]t would be advisable to have permission or immunity in advance from the convening authority, for military members utilizing these methods.” Nonetheless, her opinion, which panelist and former Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora described as “an inadequate treatment of very serious and sensitive issues,” met almost no opposition from civilian and military officials and, for a short time, became the legal basis for the DOD’s use of harsh interrogation tactics. In his testimony before the committee, Mora referred to the techniques as “cruel,” saying they “could easily rise to the level of torture.”

During a brief recess, I asked Mora how the U.S. government can mitigate the harm done to the country by these policies, and how best to hold the architects accountable for their actions. Mora suggested that the government leaders need to “create a common language with our allies that goes beyond the protections of Geneva,” referring to the United Nations Agreements on Human Rights known as the Geneva Conventions. How to hold former public officials accountable for implementing these methods, he added, “is a difficult question. Politically speaking, achieving an agreed-upon framework with our allies going forward may require forgiving past transgressions. And that’s a concern. That’s a problem.”

In his opening statement — an unusually long and thorough statement for a congressional hearing — Levin provided an exhaustive history of the origins of the government’s program of torturing prisoners at Guantanamo Bay — a program that later spread to Afghanistan, and finally to Iraq.

In 2002, senior Pentagon officials, including Shiffrin, sought and received information from the Defense Department’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency about techniques used in the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape training schools, or SERE. At those facilities, members of the military are subjected to mock interrogations, to prepare them for the possibility that they’ll one day be captured and detained by governments that do not adhere to the Geneva Conventions.

The schools’ training guidelines — which, at some facilities, include waterboarding — quickly became the practical basis for the department’s own methods of interrogating prisoners at Guantanamo Bay. Under questioning from Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., Shiffrin admitted that “there was probably some discussion at some point about ‘reverse engineering’ SERE techniques.” And, indeed, on December 30, 2002, two Navy SERE instructors arrived in Cuba to teach approximately two dozen interrogation personnel how to question detainees. Some of those trained by the SERE teachers were later instructed by their own superiors not to use those methods. Others were not.

Once greenlighted for use in Guantanamo, the SERE techniques were forwarded to U.S. military officials in Afghanistan and shown to interrogators in January 2003, just one month after Rumsfeld approved them. Several weeks later, after the Iraq war had begun, the techniques became standard operating procedure for all U.S. forces there, including those stationed at Abu Ghraib.

A month after he approved them, Rumsfeld rescinded his approval of the 15 techniques, at least in part because of objections Mora brought to Haynes. But, just as quickly, Rumsfeld established a “working group” to examine interrogation techniques and erect a legal framework that would protect military and defense officials from reprisals in the event that their conduct was later deemed to be torture. Shortly after the working group completed its report, Rumsfeld authorized another set of techniques — 24 in all– and this time he included some wiggle room: “If, in your view,” the secretary wrote, “you require additional interrogation techniques for a particular detainee, you should provide me… a written request describing the proposed technique, recommended safeguards, and the rationale for applying it with an identified detainee.”

It’s difficult, therefore, to know precisely what limits governed DOD-approved interrogation for months thereafter. But if the DOD took the advice of the Central Intelligence Agency, there may have been very few. On October 2, 2002, senior CIA attorney Jonathan Fredman met with staff at Guantanamo Bay to discuss harsh interrogation. “It’s basically subject to perception,” Fredman said, according to minutes of the meeting. “If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

See more tagged with: civil liberties, government accountability, iraq, senate armed services and torture

The Stuff Congressional Hearings Are Made Of

Divulged in memos, but largely undiscussed at yesterday’s bombshell Senate Armed Services hearing about the origins of American torture, was a September 25, 2002, meeting at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, between Major General Michael Dunlavey — who at the time was overseeing interrogations at the detention facility there — and several of the administration’s top lawyers, including William “Jim” Haynes, then general counsel to the Department of Defense, John Rizzo, acting CIA general counsel, David Addington, counsel to the vice president, and Michael Chertoff, then head of the Criminal Division at the Department of Justice.

The trip report is suspiciously short. It notes for the most part that the group received “briefings on Intel successes, Intel challenges, Intel techniques, Intel problems and future plans for facilities,” and that its members participated in “private conversations.”

But, through interviews with Dunlavey and Lieutenant Colonel Diane Beaver, author Philippe Sands got to the bottom of that trip. In his new book, Torture Team, Sands writes that the Washington gang came down, in part, to learn how the military was treating a suspect named Mohammed al-Qahtani. “They wanted to know what we were doing to get to this guy,” recalled Dunlavey. Beaver said that the message was loud and clear: do “whatever needed to be done.” In Sands’s words, “a green light from the very top — from the lawyers for Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the CIA.

That message was crucial, because just one week later, on October 2, nine people, including Beaver and CIA attorney John Fredman convened at Guantanamo for a “Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting,” where they discussed the implications of the green light, asking questions like, “What techniques can we use?” and, “What constitutes torture?” The answers — written up in meeting minutes and obtained by the Senate Armed Services committee — are pretty straightforward.

“We may need to curb the harsher operations while ICRC [the International Committee of the Red Cross] is around,” Beaver told the group, according to the minutes. “It is better not to expose them to any controversial techniques.”

One attendee, Dave Becker, who oversaw interrogations for the Defense Intelligence Agency, noted, “We have reports from Bagram [Airfield in Afghanistan] about sleep deprivation being used.”

Beaver responded, “True, but officially it is not happening. It is not being reported officially. The ICRC is a serious concern. They will be in and out scrutinizing our operations, unless they are displeased and decide to protest and leave.”

Fredman later chimed in, “Under the Torture Convention, torture has been prohibited by international law, but the language of the statutes is written vaguely. Severe mental and physical pain is prohibited. The mental part is explained as poorly as the physical…. It is basically subject to perception. If the detainee dies you’re doing it wrong…. When the CIA has wanted to use more aggressive techniques in the past, the FBI has pulled their personnel from the theatre. In those rare instances, aggressive techniques have proven very helpful.”

To which Beaver responded, “We will need documentation to protect us.”

Fredman also provided a constitutional rationale for the aggressive interrogation techniques — a pre hoc justification for the United States to abuse all enemy combatants, supposedly without falling afoul of the Geneva conventions. “The Torture Convention prohibits torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment. The US did not sign up on the second part, because of the 8th amendment…. This gives us more license to use more controversial techniques.”

In response, Beaver asked about the applicability of the “wet towel” technique, known now to most as waterboarding. Fredman responded, “If a well-trained individual is used to perform this technique it can feel like you’re drowning. The lymphatic system will react as if you’re suffocating but your body will not cease to function.”

When Mark Fallon, then the deputy commander of the Defense Department’s Criminal Investigation Task Force, received the minutes of the meeting from Sam McCahon, his chief legal advisor, he wrote, “This looks like the kinds [sic] of stuff Congressional hearings are made of…. Talk of ‘wet towel treatment’…would in my opinion; [sic] shock the conscience of any legal body looking at using the results of the interrogations or possibly even the interrogators. Someone needs to be considering how history will look back at this.”

See more tagged with: civil liberties and torture

The Friendship Offensive

Peace activists on Capitol Hill hope to stave off war with Iran through cross-cultural contact between ordinary citizens. Leaders of the Congressional Progressive Caucus show their support.

As George W. Bush focused his final presidential visit to Europe on Iran’s nuclear program, members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus joined a group of peace activists on Capitol Hill at an event designed to foster dialogue between everyday Iranians and Americans.

On Tuesday afternoon, the activist groups Enough Fear and Campaign for a New American Policy on Iran set up a phone bank outside the Cannon House office building, inviting activists, reporters, and passersby to speak with people in Iran. Leaders of the two groups seek to build lasting person-to-person ties between Iranians and Americans in the hope of building sentiment against a military confrontation between the two nations.

“The main idea is that if more people in this country have friends in Iran the two countries are less likely to go to war,” explained Nick Jehlen, co-founder of Enough Fear. “It’s as simple as that.” The event, called “Time to Talk to Iran,” was Jehlen’s brainchild.

Jehlen invited every member of Congress to attend this week’s event, but only five, all from the House of Representatives, participated: Lynne Woolsey and Barbara Lee, both California Democrats, joined Marcy Kaptur, D-Ohio, and Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas. All are members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which Woolsey and Lee co-chair. Ron Paul, the Republican presidential contender from Texas, crossed the aisle to appear with the congresswomen.

Barbara Lee has long advocated person-to-person contact as the solution to the current stand-off with Iranian leaders over their nuclear program, which President Bush and Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice contend is a precursor to weapons development. In January, Lee, who also sits on the foreign affairs committee, introduced the Iran Diplomatic Accountability Act of 2008, which, she told the gathering, “directs the president to appoint a high-level envoy empowered to seek to conduct direct, unconditional, bilateral negotiations with Iran for the purpose of easing tensions and normalizing relations between the United States and Iran.” Her legislation has idled in committee for the last six months with 14 cosponsors. Proposals in both houses of Congress intended to block the administration from using force against Iran have similarly stalled.

The Washington, D.C., event marked the third staging of a “Time To Talk” phone bank. The first took place in Boston in November 2007, and the second in New York in January. “Having congresspeople here [at a ‘Time to Talk’ event] is really an aberration for us,” Jehlen explained. “If we can facilitate dialogue between members of the American and Iranian governments in the future, we’d like to.”

At each event, a bank of four or five old-fashioned red desk phones takes center stage, though the phones are actually fed through hand-held wireless devices. The set-up is designed to resemble the crisis lines that connected officials in Washington with their Moscow counterparts during tense moments in the Cold War. About 50 people — including students and Code Pink activists — braved wilting heat and humidity to participate Tuesday’s event. Many relied on interpreters, young volunteers fluent in both English and Farsi, who joined them on the line.

The conversations tended to be brief, and were often beset by technical problems. But they were substantive, too. Friendly chats quickly developed from exchanges of simple pleasantries (How’s the weather? What do you do?) into earnest discussions about the deteriorating political situation between the two countries.

The organizers put me on the line with Morteza Rassul-Shirazi, a 60-year-old engineer in Tehran who agreed to speak on the record with an American reporter. The connection was poor (the line dropped twice), but Shirazi, along with many of his peers, he said, is concerned that U.S.-Iran hostilities could mushroom into a violent conflict. “We should not talk about war at all,” he told me. “Instead, we should try to show Americans that we are peaceful people.” Rassul-Shirazi and his friends and family in Tehran are understandably nervous. Visiting with European leaders this week, Bush sent mixed signals, focusing his early remarks on rallying European support for sanctions on Iran if it did not agree to stop enriching uranium, leading some to speculated that he was backing off from earlier saber-rattling. Then, before he left the continent, he added, “All options are on the table.”

These latest remarks capped off several weeks of escalating anti-Iran rhetoric from the administration. In a last week’s meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the White House, Bush said, “It is very important for the world to take the Iranian threat seriously.” Speaking this week in Europe, Secretary Rice accused the Iranian regime of evading international oversight, saying,”I think that no one is of a mind to allow them to stall very much longer.”

A December National Intelligence Estimate found that the Iranian government suspended its nuclear weapons program in 2003. Iran does, however, continue to pursue a uranium enrichment program, which its leaders contend is for use in peaceful projects, such as energy production.

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A General’s False Testimony on KBR

Sen. Byron Dorgan, in a May 21, 2008, meeting with reporters, speaking about the April 2007 testimony of Major Gen. Jerome Johnson - 29 seconds.

Will the Pentagon correct Major Gen. Jerome Johnson’s tainted testimony on the contaminated water KBR provided to the troops?

By Brian Beutler, The Media Consortium

When Major Gen. Jerome Johnson appeared under oath before a congressional
committee last year, he told enough untruths about KBR’s work for the
military that the US Army took the unusual step of retracting a portion of
his testimony. Now it appears that Johnson also misled members of the Senate Armed Services Committee on another KBR-related matter: its provisioning of contaminated water to U.S. troops in Iraq.

Nearly three months ago Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., chair of the
Democratic Policy Committee, sent a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates
on the subject of Johnson’s testimony, but he has yet to received a reply.
“This was either an attempt by General Johnson to deliberately deceive the
Congress, or a display of negligent disregard for facts,” Dorgan wrote in
the March 12 letter. “I hope you will review this matter and take
appropriate action.”

In April 2007, Johnson, then the commanding general of the US Army
Sustainment Command, which is responsible for providing food, lodging, and a
range of logistical support to the troops, appeared before the Senate Armed
Services Committee to answer questions about the Pentagon’s primary
logistics contract in Iraq. During the hearing, the committee’s chairman,
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., alleged that the Army had reimbursed KBR, then a
Halliburton subsidiary, for the cost of overpriced trailers the company had
purchased through a subcontractor.

“[T]he [Defense] department has not paid KBR the $100 million for the
trailers,” Johnson told Levin. “As a matter of fact, KBR’s cost is still
suspended.” Johnson when on to say that the DOD document from which Levin
drew his information was “inaccurate.” But it was Johnson who didn’t have
his facts straight.

More than seven months passed before the Army acknowledged Johnson’s
misstatement. “We sincerely regret the confusion that arose during the
testimony and apologize for any impact to the Committee’s deliberations,”
wrote Claude Bolton, assistant secretary of the Army, to Levin. In his
“correction for the record,” Bolton wrote that the Army had indeed paid KBR
for the trailers, even though the Defense Contract Audit Agency had called
the purchase “unreasonable due to KBR purchasing the [trailers] from someone other than the low bidder without…adequate justification.”

The media paid little attention to the slip-up and subsequent correction,
perhaps in part because, as the Army Times noted, “Bolton’s letter ends the argument between the Army and Levin’s committee because there is no way to recoup the money.”

Overlooked entirely, though, was a different part of Johnson’s testimony,
when he claimed the Army was unaware of reports that KBR had also been
supplying military bases with contaminated water. Because of their
negligence, a 2006 investigation by Dorgan’s policy committee found,
soldiers had unwittingly bathed in and brushed their teeth with water that,
by the senator’s account, was more polluted than the Euphrates river. The
committee’s findings prompted Dorgan to request an investigation by the
Pentagon’s Inspector General.

When Levin raised Dorgan’s charge that water provided to troops in Iraq
had tested positive for E. coli and other bacteria common to animal feces,
Johnson disputed the allegations
[PDF]. Acknowledging the inspector general’s then-ongoing investigation,
Johnson told the committee, “No issues have been found thus far that I’m
aware of.” Johnson did confirm that allegations had been raised about
contaminated water at Camp Ar-Ramadi, a base about 70 miles west of Baghdad, but said “we found no issues with the water there. After an inspection, we did not confirm the allegations that were made.”

Johnson even denied that KBR had anything to do with the provision of
water to troops at the base. “KBR was not operating the water site,” he told
the panel. But this March, when the inspector general’s office released its
report, investigators noted that the Pentagon had been notified on March 31,
2007 — three weeks before Johnson’s testimony — of KBR’s role in
providing polluted water to military bases, which “may have degraded to the
point of causing waterborne illnesses among US forces.”

Investigators found that KBR was indeed in control of water quality at Camp Ar-Ramadi, and that at three of four US bases subject to inspection, including Ar-Ramadi, KBR had shirked its contractual obligation to test the water it supplied.

At a meeting with reporters last month, Dorgan described his efforts to
uncover the extent of the unsanitary water conditions at US bases in Iraq in
the face of denials from both the Army and its contractor, KBR. “It’s clear
everyone was lying, including [Gen. Johnson], who came to the Senate
committee and deceived the committee,” Dorgan said.

At press time, Levin had not responded to a request for comment.

Johnson now serves as deputy chief of staff at the U.S. Army Forces Command in Fort McPherson, Georgia. The Pentagon declined to comment on Johnson’s testimony or why Dorgan’s letter to Gates has gone unanswered.

More from Sen. Dorgan’s May 21 meeting with reporters - 1:51

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Looking For a Few Good Republicans:
Byron Dorgan’s Quest For Wartime Oversight

The North Dakota senator has made investigating contractor corruption his mission, but will he succeed in creating a congressional committee devoted to it?

By Brian Beutler

In the wake of a recent Defense Department report from the Office of Inspector General that documents (PDF file) the improper accounting of billions of dollars in war contracting funds, the issue of waste, fraud, and abuse in Iraq is once again in the spotlight on Capitol Hill.

Those findings were amplified on Tuesday when the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-based watchdog group, obtained a separate inspector general report that found that the number of Pentagon auditors overseeing military contracts has not kept pace with defense spending, which has doubled under the Bush administration — creating conditions that are ripe for corruption and abuse.

While Congress has launched sporadic inquiries into contracting fraud, one legislator, Sen. Byron Dorgan, D-N.D., has made it his mission to investigate contractor corruption.

Dorgan chairs the Democratic Policy Committee, a Senate entity tasked with gathering and distributing policy, strategy, and oversight information to congressional staff and other Democratic officials. (There is also a Republican Policy Committee.) Since 2003, the DPC has held 14 hearings dedicated to exposing the corruption of the Iraq reconstruction effort, and last month the committee released an encyclopedic report detailing major examples of fraud.

When the war in Iraq began, says Dorgan, “no one really [decided] to say, ‘All right, now we’re going to be an investigative committee so there’s accountability.’” In order to fill the void, Dorgan decided to use his committee for that purpose — though its oversight authority is somewhat diminished by the fact that the panel, as a partisan committee, lacks subpoena power. In light of this, since 2005 Dorgan has attempted to establish a congressional committee with full oversight clout to oversee military contracting. Dubbed the Special Committee on War and Reconstruction Contracting, the proposed panel is modeled on the Senate Special Committee to Investigate the National Defense Program (commonly known as the Truman committee), which was charged with investigating the waste and corruption of billions of dollars of World War II-era defense contracts.

So far legislation to create a committee to oversee contracting for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq hasn’t gained traction. During the previous Congress, which ended in December 2006, Dorgan’s resolution was swatted down three separate times along partisan lines. (In each case, presumptive GOP presidential nominee John McCain voted with the Republican majority to nix the committee.)

A Dorgan aide says that the third-term senator plans to introduce his proposal again within the year, and is currently looking for Republican co-sponsors, which he believes will improve his chances of passing the bill. In the past, the only Republican to vote in favor of the commission was Lincoln Chaffee of Rhode Island, who lost his seat during the Democratic landslide in November of 2006. So Dorgan’s contracting committee is still a long shot.

Other senators have taken a milder approach to the idea of a modern-day Truman committee. Last year, Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va. — along with all of his fellow freshman Democrats in the Senate — sponsored a measure mandating the creation of an independent bipartisan commission (distinct from a congressional committee, which has subpoena power) to “investigate U.S. wartime contracting in Iraq and Afghanistan.” The measure passed unanimously last September as an amendment to the Defense Authorization Act, only to be written out of existence by a presidential signing statement when the bill hit President Bush’s desk in January.

If Dorgan gets his way, it could substantially bolster the Democrats’ efforts to uncover and deter acts of fraud and corruption in war contracting. Currently those efforts have been driven almost exclusively by House Oversight Committee Chairman Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich. Since taking the House oversight gavel in January 2007, Waxman has held a host of hearings on defense contracting fraud, with a particular emphasis on the companies, like Blackwater and KBR, that have been some of the biggest beneficiaries of the war in Iraq.

Levin has spotlighted the issue of contractor fraud on a number of occasions, but, like Waxman, the focus of his committee extends well beyond contracting oversight. The existing congressional committees, Dorgan says, “have not had the investigators and the time,” to give this issue the focus it deserves. “So, we have held these hearings, and the waste, the fraud, and the abuse is staggering.”

——–
Brian Beutler is the Washington correspondent for The Media Consortium, a network of progressive media organizations.

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Lost Iraq Funds

An Inspector General report released today confirms what just about everybody already knew–that the Department of Defense has squandered billions of American dollars due to contracting fraud and abuse in Iraq.

In response, House Oversight and Government Reform committee chairman Henry Waxman held a hearing today to spell out some of the reports findings, which include:

• That of the $8.2 billion in contracting funds audited by the IG between April 2001 and June 2006, 95 percent were improperly accounted for, and $1.4 billion in payments “were missing critically important documentation.” Some commercial payments were distributed without the documentation of any promised service. As a result IG officials have referred 28 suspicious cases to criminal investigators
• That of the $2.7 billion congress has appropriated for the Commander’s Emergency Response Program (CERP)–created to help foreign agents to provide humanitarian relief–the IG found that $134.8 million was distributed without a complete audit trail. The IG was “unable to ensure that CERP funds provided to Coalition Partners have been used for their intended purposes. In other words, the money was handed to foreign governments without any meaningful strings.
• That none of the $1.8 billion in seized Iraqi assets–intended for humanitarian purposes, and audited by the IG–was adequately accounted for.

To these findings, Waxman intoned that “there is something very wrong when our wounded troops have to fill out forms in triplicate for meal money while billions of dollars in cash are handed out in Iraq with no accountability.”

Though concerned with the potential for corruption and waste, Republicans on the committee sought to downplay the importance of the IG’s findings, and to divorce the issue of waste from any questions about the conduct of the war itself.

“Few people operating in an active combat zone would refer to the documentation requirements…as ‘mission critical’ work,” said Ranking Member Tom Davis. “Similarly,” he went on, “no one should deny the imperative to tell American taxpayers how their money is being spent. So we need to balance these two truths…. We should not let a focus on the war blind us to the government-wide need for veteran finance officials to watch over large, and growing, expenditures.”

Waxman invited Defense officials to testify at today’s hearing, but the department refused to cooperate. At the end of the hearing, Rep. John Tierney–who chairs the National Security subcommittee–suggested that the committee consider compelling their appearance. “I think we have subpoena power, and I’d ask [Chairman Waxman] and the ranking member at some point in time to consider using it where appropriate so the Department of Defense wouldn’t think they can avoid… public scrutiny.”

Perhaps in an echo of hearings to come, Waxman responded: “I think you make an excellent point. I think we need to hear from the Defense Department. “

See more tagged with: Blackwater, iraq and Rep. John Tierney

Torture Overseas

The ACLU–conducting more oversight these days than Congress and the mainstream media combined–has gotten a hold of some previously unreleased documents detailing the torture of detainees at Guantanamo Bay and other overseas facilities. Here (PDF file), for instance:

[Wisam] Abd-Al-Rahman described his reported period of detention in Afghanistan from January 2002 until April 2003 as moving from ‘one American prison to another’, staying in cold, dark, and crowded rooms. He said he stayed, without charges or interrogation, with nine other persons in a 25 square foot room without sunlight and fed only bread and rice for a period of about 77 days. He said that sanitary and hygiene conditions were terrible, and that he did not receive medical care nor see the sun during the period of detention in Afghanistan. He also reported sleep deprivation, undressing in front of female soldiers, desecration of the Koran by a dog, beatings, and threats of harm from barking dogs while blindfolded.

Abd-al-Rahman was later found to be innocent.

Here’s a series of accounts (PDF file) of the deaths of four detainees killed in captivity in Iraq.

Here’s a list of talking points (PDF file) about torture, as conveyed in a State Department cable transmission. Note that the people who received them were warned that they should “not be given to non-usg [U.S. Government] persons or left behind after meetings.”

And there’s plenty more that I haven’t read through yet. Give them a look yourself, and I’ll post anything interesting I come across as I peruse them.

See more tagged with: civil liberties and torture

Iran: Sabers and Sobriety

Much has been written already about General David Petraeus’ and Ambassador Ryan Crocker’s two days of marathon testimony on Capitol Hill this week, including plenty about the degree to which they also testified about Iran’s influence both in Iraq and in the greater Middle East. Petraeus was quick to call Iran’s influence in Iraq “malevolent”, but less quick to reconcile that influence with the fact that Iran is on friendly terms with the U.S.-backed Iraqi government. Just hours after the two men wrapped up their show, President Bush kicked up the rhetoric. According to the Times of London, “President Bush warned Iran [] that if it did not stop arming and training Shia militia in Iraq then ‘America will act to protect our interests and our troops’.”

Interestingly, while Petraeus and Crocker sat before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Tuesday, the National Iranian American Council hosted a conference, drawing on the expertise of journalists, scholars, former chief U.N. Weapons Inspector Hans Blix, and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), to examine America’s best options if it seeks to keep Iran’s nuclear weapons program dormant. Iran, which recently claimed to be installing 6,000 new centrifuges at its uranium enrichment plant in Natanz, could restart its weapons program, and preventing that, the guests noted, will likely require direct U.S. diplomatic engagement with the Islamic Republic.

That process would no doubt have an impact on Iran’s influence in Iraq, and it might well prove to be a positive one. “Iran recently proved helpful in brokering a ceasefire between Prime Minister al-Maliki and Muqtada al-Sadr’s JAM militias in Basra, Feinstein noted. “Clearly, a more positive relationship with Iran might be helpful in stabilizing Iraq.” That ceasefire is by no means destined to hold, and will by no means solve the fundamental political rifts that keep Iraq ablaze. But it has knocked violence down noticeably, which is something all sides no doubt welcome.

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U.S. Troops and Torture

Here are some new, troubling allegations:

[Murat] Kurnaz [a German citizen of Turkish descent] claims his interrogations at Kandahar turned to torture. He told 60 Minutes that American troops held his head underwater.”They used to beat me when my head is underwater. They beat me into my stomach and everything,” he says.

“They were hitting you in the stomach while you’re head was underwater so that you’d have to take a breath?” Pelley asks,

“Right. I had to drink. I had to…how you say it?” Kurnaz replies.

“Inhale. Inhale the water,” Pelley says.

“I had to inhale the water. Right,” Kurnaz says.

Kurnaz says the Americans used a device to shock him with electricity that made his body go numb. And he says he was hoisted up on chains suspended by his arms from the ceiling of an aircraft hangar for five days.

“Every five or six hours they came and pulled me back down. And the doctor came to watch if I can still survive to not. He looked into my eyes. He checked my heart. And when he said okay, then they pulled me back up,” Kurnaz says.

“The point of the doctor’s visit was not to treat you. It was to see if you could take another six hours hanging from the ceiling?” Pelley asks.

“Right,” Kurnaz says.

“I suspect you know that the U.S. military will deny this happened. The U.S. military will deny that you were shocked. It will deny your head was held in a bucket of water. It will deny that you hung from a ceiling for days at a time,” Pelley remarks.

“Doesn’t matter whatever they will say. The truth will not change,” Kurnaz says.

Not surprisingly, he was guilty of nothing.

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The Passing of Tom Lantos

Rep. Tom Lantos (D-CA) passed away today at the age of 80. Just two months ago, after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer, he announced that he would not seek re-election this fall.

Lantos represented California’s 12th congressional district–a carat-shaped patch of liberal geography that stretches from south San Francisco down the Bay Area peninsula into San Mateo county. In an environment like that, his seat will no doubt be retained by another progressive Democrat.

But Lantos wasn’t just a garden-variety progressive. He was also the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And, as such, he enjoyed jurisdiction, in the 110th Congress, over funding for foreign aide programs and directing arms sales, training for the country’s allies, and other crucial aspects of the nation’s international relations. In that regard, Lantos performed admirably–he was a great friend to the United Nations, a strong proponent of diplomatic engagement with hostile country, and had metamorphosed from a loud supporter into a formidable critic of the president’s efforts in Iraq.

His approach to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was generally less even handed. Lantos was a famously strong supporter of Israel, and of many of its policies in the occupied territories. But he had seemed, in recent months, to have softened some of his views.

Now, though, the gavel will be passed down to a new chairman, who will be selected by the whole caucus (all House Democrats) in the days ahead. Traditionally, chairmanship falls to the senior member of the committee (in this case Rep. Howard Berman of California), but there’s no rule requiring that. When he announced his coming retirement, I made a series of inquiries on the Hill about which committee Democrat was most likely to replace him. Most of the people I asked–committee and leadership aides–noted the seniority tradition, suggesting that Berman would be the most likely to assume Lantos’ position.

But a surprising number said that Berman–who’s also the senior Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee–might prefer succeeding John Conyers, whenever he vacates his position. And that would put Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-NY) at the front of the line.

Both men–Berman and Ackerman–have views on foreign policy that closely mirror Lantos’. Both endorse the policies of hawkish factions within Israel, and both have taken a fairly hard-line stance against Iran–devoting similar energies to arguing for Iran’s economic isolation as to fostering dialog with that country’s government.

But there’s another long-shot possibility, too–one that’s appealing to some progressive foreign policy thinkers. Speaker Nancy Pelosi could, in a politically risky move, throw her support behind somebody farther down the line. And one name that I’ve heard mentioned a few times is Rep. Bill Delahunt (D-Mass.)

The six-term congressman has impressive foreign policy bona fides. As chairman of the subcommittee on international organizations, human rights, and oversight–all issues dear to Lantos–he’s investigated issues such as visa acquisition, rendition, torture, and inspector general malfeasance. And he’s been willing to inject life and reality into some of the more sclerotic foreign policy debates of the past several years. “While we have an embargo on Cuba and restrict American citizens’ ability to travel there,” Delahunt said in July at a hearing about iniquities in American aide and diplomacy, “we provide Egypt with $2 billion worth of American taxpayer resources, and Azerbaijain receives assistance as well.”

Delahunt curries favor with Pelosi, as well. At 66 years old, he’s one of two honorary members of Pelosi’s “30 Something Working Group”, dedicated to encouraging youth involvement in government and the political process. His ascent is by no means out of the question. But neither he nor his aides will comment just yet on what the future might hold, and on a committee stacked at the top with so many like-minded foreign policy thinkers, it may be unlikely.

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