Torture – Page 6 – Infinite Unknown

How a lawyer unearthed US torture documents

August 31, 2009 by Infinite

Now revealing the TRUTH has become a recruitment beacon for Al-Qaeda!

“Truth never damages a cause that is just.”
– Mahatma Gandhi

“It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. ”
– Thomas Jefferson

“Truth is treason in the empire of lies. Let the revolution begin!”
– Ron Paul

Jameel Jaffer dug up torture memos.

One of the key figures behind the cascade of documents detailing torture and abuse within America’s global “war on terror” happens to be a Canadian-born graduate of Toronto’s Upper Canada College.

Jameel Jaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer born in London, Ont., was instrumental in filing and fighting an unlikely Freedom of Information Act request that eventually unearthed thousands of pages of secret documents which illustrated damning evidence of U.S. government complicity in violations of international humanitarian law.

“A lot of the documents describe abuses that are really horrific,” he said in an interview. “It was hard to believe that these incidents had occurred in facilities run by the United States.”

Jaffer told the Star last night that this type of lengthy and expensive legal muck-raking is unlikely to occur in Canada because grants and funding are so scarce. “There are people doing this kind of work in Canada and they have a tough job,” he said.”

The request was filed by Jaffer and fellow ACLU lawyer Amrit Singh – daughter of Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – in October 2003, before the disturbingly iconic Abu Ghraib prison photographs emerged. When those photos came out in April of 2004, they spurred Jaffer and Singh to press their request in court, which is sometimes the only way to successfully pursue an FOI request.

Six years later, more than 130,000 pages of previously classified evidence has trickled out; much of it has been seized upon by critics of America’s seemingly unending global war on terrorism.

The documents uncovered by Jaffer and Singh are a gruesome testament to the grim realities of the post-9/11 world: they revealed fissures between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military over how to treat detainees at Guantanamo Bay; vivid descriptions of conditions within the CIA’s overseas “black site” prisons, where detainees were sent without trial; the Justice Department “torture memos,” which revealed prominent U.S. officials had essentially signed-off on torture; and autopsies of prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The evidence has been seized upon by supporters of the war as well, who say Jaffer and the ACLU have given a propaganda weapon and recruitment beacon for Al Qaeda.

“In general, I think our position is that national security is increasingly used as a pretext to suppress information that would embarrass government officials and information related to criminal activity,” Jaffer told the Star. “And we think that the abuse of national security for those ends is something that, in the end, jeopardizes not just security but democracy as well, and that’s really what motivates a lot of these cases.”

CIA Report: Interrogators Threatened to Kill And Rape Family Members of Detainees

August 25, 2009 by Infinite

CIA interrogators threatened to kill and rape relatives of detainees, including the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, a declassified report shows.

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A CIA interrogator threatened to kill the children of the the September 11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed if al-Qa’eda attacked the US again, according to a declassified report. Photo: AP

The report, released on Monday by the US Justice Department, said that a CIA interrogator told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that if any other attacks happened in the United States, “We’re going to kill your children”.

Another interrogator allegedly tried to convince a detainee that his mother would be sexually assaulted in front of him. The interrogator later denied making the threat.

The report, written in 2004, was made public after a legal petition by the American Council for Civil Liberties. It also reportedly disclosed how interrogators conducted mock executions and threatened a suspect in the bombing of the USS Cole with a gun and a power drill.

“Ten years from now we’re going to be sorry we’re doing this [but] it has to be done,” one unidentified CIA officer said in the report, predicting that interrogators would someday have to appear in court to answer for such tactics.

It was released as the government launched a criminal investigation into the spy agency’s “unauthorized, improvised, inhumane” practices in the wake of the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks on the US, and as President Barack Obama ordered the creation of a new unit for interrogating terrorist suspects, taking responsibility away from the CIA.

The High-Value Detainee Interrogation Group will answer to the White House and be run by FBI officials from the bureau’s Washington headquarters. It will follow guidelines set by the US army’s field manual, which conforms to international law.

Obama administration asks the Supreme Court to block detainee photos

August 8, 2009 by Infinite

The Obama Administration wants detainee abuse photos blocked by the Supreme Court. (AP)

The Obama Administration is asking the Supreme Court to block the public release of detainee abuse photos that were the subject of a high-profile reversal by President Barack Obama earlier this year.

On Friday afternoon, the Justice Department filed a petition with the Supreme Court asking it to overturn an appeals court decision requiring the Pentagon to disclose the photos, which depict alleged abuse of prisoners in U.S. military custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The President of the United States and the Nation’s highest-ranking military officers responsible for ongoing combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have determined that disclosure by the government of the photographs at issue in this case would pose a significant risk to the lives and physical safety of American military and civilian personnel by inciting violence targeting those personnel,” Solicitor General Elena Kagan wrote.

The photos are being sought by the American Civil Liberties Union as part of a long running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit pertaining to alleged abuse of detainees held abroad by U.S. forces.

Dick Cheney ordered CIA to hide counter-terrorism plan

July 12, 2009 by Infinite

Dick Cheney, the former Vice President, ordered the CIA to hide a mysterious counter-terrorism programme from Congress for eight years, despite US laws demanding its disclosure.

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Dick Cheney, the former Vice President, ordered the CIA to hide a mysterious counter-terrorism programme from Congress for eight years, despite US laws demanding its disclosure. Photo: AP

The programme was shut down on the very day the Obama administration learned of its existence last month. Details remain cloaked in secrecy, however, and assurances have been given that it was never activated.

That has not prevented lurid speculation of an alleged Mossad-style elimination unit, or possible anti-terror operations inside America, which the CIA is legally barred from conducting.

Related articles:
– Cheney Is Linked to Concealment of CIA Project (New York Times)
– Cheney told CIA to withhold information: report (Reuters)

Mr Cheney is also the possible target of a criminal investigation for allegedly permitting torture by the CIA. It emerged at the weekend that Eric Holder, the Attorney General, may appoint a special prosecutor to investigate whether members of the Bush Administration broke the law by allowing the CIA use “waterboarding” on terror suspects.

The Focus is now on the antiterrorist programme which Leon Panetta, the CIA director, was only briefed about on June 23, four months after he took office. Officials told the New York Times that “the unidentified programme was devised and deliberately concealed from Congress” in the months just after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001.

Mr Panetta was sufficiently alarmed by what he learned to close down the programme immediately. The following day, he briefed members of the Senate and House intelligence committees about the former Vice President’s deception.

Mr Panetta told the Congressmen that for the past eight years, Mr Cheney had deliberately kept the oversight committees in the dark about the antiterrorist measures.

Former Associate Attorney General Bruce Fein: Obama ‘shuts his eyes’ to ‘open confessions’ of Bush-era war crimes

June 30, 2009 by Infinite

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Velvet Revolution attorney Kevin Zeese, speaking at the National Press Club on Monday.

Speaking at the National Press Club on Monday, former Reagan administration Associate Attorney General Bruce Fein lamented President Barack Obama’s decision to shut his eyes to open confessions of war crimes by members of the prior administration.

“It’s at the highest levels that the rule of law finds its greatest majesty,” he told reporters. “That’s why the United States was so idolized after Nixon left. We said that the most powerful man in the world is subject to the law. He cannot defy it.”

Fein was making the historical argument with respect to the Obama administration’s continued refusal to investigate the Bush administration’s torture program, which was designed and specifically authorized by high-level officials.

“[Today] we have an instance where the President of the United States — Harvard Law Review, a Constitutional Law professor who knows what the law is — shuts his eyes to open confessions,” he said. “We authorized torture, for which there is no exception.”

Fein was speaking on behalf of Velvet Revolution, a coalition of over 150 peace and religious groups, that is leading the charge to get attorneys involved in the Bush administration’s torture program thrown out of office and the legal profession.

Gang of wealthy German pensioners kidnaps and tortures financial adviser who lost their savings

June 23, 2009 by Infinite

Kidnapped: James Arnburn was held at a house on the shores of Lake Chiemsee during his ordeal (file picture)

A gang of wealthy pensioners kidnapped and tortured a financial adviser in Germany after he lost £2m of their savings during the financial crisis.

Dubbed ‘The Geritol Gang’ by police – after the arthritis drug – the kidnappers seized James Arnburn and subjected him to a four-day ordeal

He was burned with cigarettes, beaten with a chair leg and chained up ‘like an animal’

Mr Arnburn, 56, described how two of his kidnappers, identified only as Roland K, 74, and Willy D, 60, hit him with a Zimmer frame outside his home in Speyer, west Germany before binding him with duct tape.

He was bundled into the boot of a silver Audi saloon and driven 300 miles to the home of Roland K on the shores of Lake Chiemsee in Bavaria.

As the financial advisor, who runs investment firm Digitalglobalnet, was bundled into the cellar another couple, retired doctors Gerhard and Iris F, aged 63 and 66, arrived to assist his kidnappers.

Mr Amburn said: ‘I had known these people for 25 years. I had no reason to be afraid. But as I went into my home I was jumped from the rear and struck.

‘They bound me with masking tape until I looked like a mummy. It took them quite a while because they ran out of breath. When they loaded me into the car I thought I was a dead man.

‘I was bleeding from my eyes, nose and my mouth. But the nightmare had only just started.’

ACLU hits Obama administration hard over torture controversies

June 13, 2009 by Infinite

“The Obama administration has now fully embraced the Bush administration’s shameful effort to immunize torturers and their enablers from any legal consequences for their actions,” said Ben Wizner, an ACLU lawyer representing the five men, in a press release. “The CIA’s rendition and torture program is not a ‘state secret;’ it’s an international scandal. If the Obama administration has its way, no torture victim will ever have his day in court, and future administrations will be free to pursue torture policies without any fear of liability.”

Change you can believe in!

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The American Civil Liberties Union had strong words on Friday for the Obama administration’s efforts to block the release of torture photos and its attempts to end a lawsuit over extraordinary rendition.

The ACLU criticized the White House’s deal with Congress, struck on Thursday, which eliminated a provision in a military financing bill that would have blocked the release of torture photos – but only after President Barack Obama promised to “use every legal and administrative remedy” available to keep the photos from the public.

“Keeping the photos secret while letting the high level perpetrators off the hook cannot be tolerated if we are to get an America we can be proud of again,” said Anthony Romero, executive director of the ACLU. “This information is necessary to create an accurate historical record and to force an increasingly recalcitrant Justice Department to undertake a criminal investigation of those who authorized and implemented the Bush administration’s torture program.”

London’s Metropolitan Police accused of waterboarding drug suspects

June 10, 2009June 10, 2009 by Infinite

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The claims are part of an investigation which includes accusations that evidence was fabricated and suspects’ property was stolen

Metropolitan Police officers subjected suspects to waterboarding, according to allegations at the centre of a major anti-corruption inquiry, The Times has learnt.

The torture claims are part of a wide-ranging investigation which also includes accusations that officers fabricated evidence and stole suspects’ property. It has already led to the abandonment of a drug trial and the suspension of several police officers.

However, senior policing officials are most alarmed by the claim that officers in Enfield, North London, used the controversial CIA interrogation technique to simulate drowning. Scotland Yard is appointing a new borough commander in Enfield in a move that is being seen as an attempt by Sir Paul Stephenson, the Met Commissioner, to enforce a regime of “intrusive supervision”.

The waterboarding claims will fuel the debate about police conduct that has raged in the wake of hundreds of public complaints of brutality at the anti-G20 protests in April.

The part of the inquiry focusing on alleged police brutality has been taken over by the Independent Police Complaints Commission. It is examining the conduct of six officers connected to drug raids in November in which four men and a woman were arrested at addresses in Enfield and Tottenham. Police said they found a large amount of cannabis and the suspects were charged with importation of a Class C drug. The case was abandoned four months later when the Crown Prosecution Service said it would not have been in the public interest to proceed. It is understood that the trial, by revealing the torture claims, would have compromised the criminal investigation into the six officers.

Obama’s Homeland Security Nominee Withdraws Amid Questions About Torture

June 6, 2009 by Infinite

Philip Mudd was nominated for an intelligence post. (AP)

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration’s nominee to lead intelligence efforts at the Department of Homeland Security withdrew Friday after it became clear that lawmakers would raise questions about his role in the Bush administration’s interrogation programs.

Philip Mudd, who has 24 years of intelligence experience, said in a letter to the White House that he worried that his nomination could become a “distraction” from President Obama’s agenda.

Mr. Mudd is now a deputy in Federal Bureau of Investigation’s counterterrorism unit. Before that, he was deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center. It was in the latter post that legislators believed Mr. Mudd became deeply involved with the government’s enhanced interrogation efforts, including the use of the simulated drowning technique known as waterboarding.

A White House aide said the president was well aware of Mr. Mudd’s links with interrogation programs that the Obama administration has described as torture. Still, the aide said Mr. Obama had complete confidence that Mr. Mudd was the best person for the Homeland Security post.

On the Edge with Max Keiser (06/05/09)

June 5, 2009 by Infinite

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Former Senior Interrogator in Iraq Dissects Cheney’s Lies and Distortions

May 26, 2009 by Infinite

By Matthew Alexander: Led the interrogations that found Zarqawi; author of “How to Break a Terrorist”

As a senior interrogator in Iraq (and a former criminal investigator), there was a lesson I learned that served me well: there’s more to be learned from what someone doesn’t say than from what they do say. Let me dissect former Vice President Dick Cheney’s speech on National Security using this model and my interrogation skills.

First, VP Cheney said, “This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately… it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do.” He further stated, “It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so.” That is simply untrue. Anyone who served in Iraq, and veterans on both sides of the aisle have made this argument, knows that the foreign fighters did not come to Iraq en masse until after the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I heard this from captured foreign fighters day in and day out when I was supervising interrogations in Iraq. What the former vice president didn’t say is the fact that the dislike of our policies in the Middle East were not enough to make thousands of Muslim men pick up arms against us before these revelations. Torture and abuse became Al Qaida’s number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives.

Secondly, the former vice president, in saying that waterboarding is not torture, never mentions the fact that it was the United States and its Allies, during the Tokyo Trials, that helped convict a Japanese soldier for war crimes for waterboarding one of Jimmie Doolittle’s Raiders. Have our morals and values changed in fifty years? He also did not mention that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both prohibited their troops from torturing prisoners of war. Washington specifically used the term “injure” — no mention of severe mental or physical pain.

Thirdly, the former vice president never mentioned the Senate testimony of Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who successfully interrogated Abu Zubaydah and learned the identity of Jose Padilla, the dirty bomber, and the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) was the mastermind behind 9/11. We’ll never know what more we could have discovered from Abu Zubaydah had not CIA contractors taken over the interrogations and used waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Also, glaringly absent from the former vice president’s speech was any mention of the fact that the former administration never brought Osama bin Laden to justice and that our best chance to locate him would have been through KSM or Abu Zubaydah had they not been waterboarded.

Obushma-Biney in the Home of the Frightened

June 29, 2009May 24, 2009 by Infinite

By Willem Buiter:

Professor of European Political Economy, London School of Economics and Political Science; former chief economist of the EBRD, former external member of the MPC; adviser to international organisations, governments, central banks and private financial institutions.

The spinelessness and moral cowardice of the Obama administration know no bounds. The Bush-Cheney team ordered the torture and abuse of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay Naval Base and assorted other locations abroad – offshore detention without trial as well as torture by US officials or persons acting under their instructions being permitted by Article VIII of the United States Constitution, as confirmed in the XXVIIIth Amendment to the US Constitution.

Candidate Obama declares he abhors torture and deplores what went on in Gitmo and in secret detention centres around the world, but President Obama decides that the Camp may have to remain open for another year, as he doesn’t seem to know what to do with the prisoners. The right thing to do would have been to send a plane to Guantánamo Bay Naval Base on the day of his inauguration, to move all the prisoners to the USA.

President Obama then also decides not to prosecute those who committed the crimes of torture or abuse of prisoners or were responsible for these crimes. The president’s excuse was was that he sought to turn the page on “a dark and painful chapter”. It was a “time for reflection, not for retribution”, he said.

He is quite wrong. Reflection complements the law. It is not a substitute for it. Those who can be charged with these offences should be tried and, if found guilty, punished according to the law. If among the guilty parties are CIA agents and former vice-president Dick Cheney, then so be it. If you cannot do the time, you should not do the crime. This is not vengeance, it is justice – and it is the law. Justice must be done and must be seen to be done before healing and reconciliation can start.

Conservative radio hosts gets waterboarded, and lasts six seconds before saying its torture

May 23, 2009 by Infinite

What a genius !

Chicago radio host Erich “Mancow” Muller decided he’d get himself waterboarded to prove the technique wasn’t torture.

It didn’t turn out that way. “Mancow,” in fact, lasted just six or seven seconds before crying foul. Apparently, the experience went pretty badly — “Witnesses said Muller thrashed on the table, and even instantly threw the toy cow he was holding as his emergency tool to signify when he wanted the experiment to stop,” according to NBC Chicago.

“The average person can take this for 14 seconds,” Marine Sergeant Clay South told his audience before he was waterboarded on air. “He’s going to wiggle, he’s going to scream, he’s going to wish he never did this.”

Mancow was set on a 7-foot long table with his legs elevated and his feet tied.

“I wanted to prove it wasn’t torture,” Mancow said. “They cut off our heads, we put water on their face…I got voted to do this but I really thought ‘I’m going to laugh this off.’ “

The upshot? “It is way worse than I thought it would be, and that’s no joke,” Mancow told listeners. “It is such an odd feeling to have water poured down your nose with your head back…It was instantaneous…and I don’t want to say this: absolutely torture.”

“Absolutely. I mean that’s drowning,” he added later. “It is the feeling of drowning.”

“If I knew it was gonna be this bad, I would not have done it,” he said.

The 42-year-old radio host is no stranger to controversy. In 2005, he was maligned for saying that then-Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean was “vile,” “bloodthirsty,” “evil” and “should be kicked out of America.”

Watch him be waterboarded in the following video:

And watch his response here:

John Byrne
Friday, May 22nd, 2009

Source: The Raw Story

Here Are a Few of the Torture Photos Obama Doesn’t Want You To See

May 14, 2009 by Infinite

Obama has changed his mind, and is now trying to prevent the release of the torture photos.

Here are just a few of the photos he doesn’t want you to see (leaked to the Sydney Morning Herald several years ago ):

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Ex-FBI agent: Waterboarding produced no actionable intel

May 14, 2009 by Infinite

This video is from C-SPAN 3, broadcast May 13, 2009.
Download video via RawReplay.com

A former FBI agent who interrogated suspected terrorists told a Senate panel Wednesday that no actionable intelligence was gained from “enhanced interrogations” such as waterboarding.

“I strongly believe that it is a mistake to use what has become known as enhanced interrogation techniques,” said Ali Soufan who worked for the FBI from 1997 to 2005. “These techniques, from an operational perspective, are slow, ineffective, unreliable, and harmed our efforts to defeat al Qaeda.”

Soufan said that intelligent interrogation techniques used by the FBI were “in sharp contrast to the enhanced interrogation method that instead tries to subjugate the detainee into submission through humiliation and cruelty. The idea behind it is to force the detainee to see the interrogator as the master who controls his pain. It’s merely an exercise in trying to force compliance rather than elicit cooperation.”

“One major problem is that it is ineffective. Al Qaeda are trained to resist torture,” he said.

“In contrast, when we interrogated using intelligent interrogation methods [on Abu Zubaydah] within the first hour we gained important actionable intelligence.”

President Obama Reverses Course on Releasing More Detainee Abuse Photographs

May 23, 2009May 13, 2009 by Infinite

change

More change!

President Obama defended his decision to fight the release of photos showing detainee abuse Wednesday afternoon, saying it would only put American troops in harms way and create a backlash against Americans.

“The most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would be to further inflame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger,” the president said before departing on his trip to Arizona. “Moreover, I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse.”

The move is a complete 180. In a letter from the Justice Department to a federal judge on April 23, the Obama administration announced that the Pentagon would turn over 44 photographs showing detainee abuse of prisoners in Afghanistan and Iraq during the Bush administration.

But in a letter sent this afternoon to the District Court Judge in the case, Alvin Hellerstein of the US District Court in the Southern District of New York, acting US Attorney Lev Dassin, writes that while his previous April 23 letter informed the court that the Obama administration had decided not to seek certiorari of the Second Circuit Court’s ruling to force the release of the photographs, his office had “been informed today that, upon further reflection at the highest levels of Government, the Government has decided to pursue further options regarding that decision, including but not limited to the option of seeking certiorari.”

The deadline for that decision is June 9.

The photographs are part of a 2003 Freedom of Information Act request by the ACLU for all information relating to the treatment of detainees — the same battle that led to President Obama’s decision to release memos from the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel providing legal justifications for brutal interrogation methods, many of which the International Committee of the Red Cross calls torture.

Obama and the War Criminals

May 4, 2009 by Infinite

Added: 2. Mai 2009
Source: YouTube

Five Things You Should Know About the Torture Memos

By Judge Andrew Napolitano

No. 1. I have read the 175 pages of legal memoranda (the memos) that the Department of Justice (DoJ) released last week. They consist of letters written by Bush DoJ officials to the Deputy General Counsel of the CIA concerning the techniques that may be used by American intelligence agents when interrogating high value detainees at facilities outside the U.S. The memos describe in vivid, gut-wrenching detail the procedures that the CIA apparently inquired about. The memos then proceed to authorize every procedure asked about, and to commend the CIA for taking the time to ask.

Spanish Court Weighs Inquiry on Torture for 6 Bush-Era Officials

March 28, 2009 by Infinite

Baltasar Garzón, front, in Madrid. He has built an international reputation by bringing cases against human rights violators.

LONDON – A Spanish court has taken the first steps toward opening a criminal investigation into allegations that six former high-level Bush administration officials violated international law by providing the legal framework to justify the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, an official close to the case said.

The case, against former Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and others, was sent to the prosecutor’s office for review by Baltasar Garzón, the crusading investigative judge who ordered the arrest of the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet. The official said that it was “highly probable” that the case would go forward and that it could lead to arrest warrants.

US tried to gag British man tortured in Guantanamo

March 24, 2009 by Infinite

Captive told he would be freed if he pleaded guilty and agreed not to speak to media

‘The facts reflect the way the US government has tried to cover up… the torture’ said Clive Stafford Smith, Director of legal group Reprieve

The American government tried to force a British resident held at Guantanamo Bay to drop allegations of torture in return for his release, court documents published yesterday revealed.

Binyam Mohamed, 30, held by the US for nearly seven years, was told by the American military that he could win his freedom if he pleaded guilty to terrorism charges, ended his High Court case to prove his claims of torture and agreed not to speak to the media about his ordeal. He rejected the deal.

Details of the extraordinary plea bargain were seized on by Mr Mohamed’s lawyers as further evidence to support his allegations that he was illegally detained and brutally tortured after his capture by Pakistani and US security agents in 2002.

The document released by the High Court in London reveals that the plea bargain was offered last year while Mr Mohamed was held in the US naval base in Cuba, but after terrorism allegations against him had been dropped. Mr Mohamed was eventually released from Guantanamo Bay this year and allowed to return home.

New video of torture exposes Chinese brutality in Tibet (03/20/09)

March 21, 2009March 21, 2009 by Infinite

The Tibetan government-in-exile, led by the Dalai Lama, has released a video that appears to show Tibetan monks being tortured by Chinese security forces.

Be warned that is the original video and not the Telegraph’s version:

Added: March 21, 2009
Source: YouTube

Video footage from Tibet is extremely rare. The film, which shows violent scenes from the March 2008 riots, is the clearest evidence yet that Tibetans were subject to police brutality as China struggled for control in Lhasa.

In the seven-minute film, exerpts of which are shown above, Chinese police kick and beat apparently defenceless Tibetan protesters and monks after they have been handcuffed and are lying on the ground.

The Tibetan government-in-exile, which is based in Dharamsala in India, said the treatment of the captives violated international norms and amounted to torture.

Until now, the only video evidence of the riots in March was shot from long-distance and showed clashes in the streets of Lhasa but not evidence of torture.

“This is the first footage which visibly proves the use of brutal and excessive force against Tibetan protesters. It clearly challenges official Chinese statements that disproportionate force was not used on unarmed protesters,” said Stephanie Brigden, the director of the international campaign group Free Tibet.

The second half of the video, which is too graphic to show here, documents a serious set of injuries allegedly sustained by a Tibetan worker after he intervened in the beating of a monk.

According to the Tibetan government-in-exile, Chinese police shot at the man, who was named as Tendar, and then stubbed cigarettes out on his body, forced a nail through his right foot and beat him with an electric baton.

He was initially taken to a military hospital but, according to the video, his wounds were merely wrapped in cling film, which allowed them to rot. He subsequently died of his injuries in June 2008.

Many at Gitmo are innocent – Ex-Bush administration official

March 19, 2009 by Infinite

Six to seven years in prison at Guantanamo being innocent!

Camp Delta detention compound, which has housed foreign prisoners since 2002, at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba. (AP)

SAN JUAN, Puerto Rico – Many detainees locked up at Guantanamo were innocent men swept up by U.S. forces unable to distinguish enemies from noncombatants, a former Bush administration official said Thursday. “There are still innocent people there,” Lawrence B. Wilkerson, a Republican who was chief of staff to then-Secretary of State Colin Powell, told The Associated Press. “Some have been there six or seven years.”

Don’t miss: Former CIA officer: Bush should have executed Gitmo detainees

Wilkerson, who first made the assertions in an Internet posting on Tuesday, told the AP he learned from briefings and by communicating with military commanders that the U.S. soon realized many Guantanamo detainees were innocent but nevertheless held them in hopes they could provide information for a “mosaic” of intelligence.

“It did not matter if a detainee were innocent. Indeed, because he lived in Afghanistan and was captured on or near the battle area, he must know something of importance,” Wilkerson wrote in the blog. He said intelligence analysts hoped to gather “sufficient information about a village, a region, or a group of individuals, that dots could be connected and terrorists or their plots could be identified.”

Wilkerson, a retired Army colonel, said vetting on the battlefield during the early stages of U.S. military operations in Afghanistan was incompetent with no meaningful attempt to discriminate “who we were transporting to Cuba for detention and interrogation.”

Red Cross Described Torture at CIA Jails

March 16, 2009 by Infinite

Secret Report Implies That U.S. Violated International Law

The International Committee of the Red Cross concluded in a secret report that the Bush administration’s treatment of al-Qaeda captives “constituted torture,” a finding that strongly implied that CIA interrogation methods violated international law, according to newly published excerpts from the long-concealed 2007 document.

The report, an account alleging physical and psychological brutality inside CIA “black site” prisons, also states that some U.S. practices amounted to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.” Such maltreatment of detainees is expressly prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.

The findings were based on an investigation by ICRC officials, who were granted exclusive access to the CIA’s “high-value” detainees after they were transferred in 2006 to the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The 14 detainees, who had been kept in isolation in CIA prisons overseas, gave remarkably uniform accounts of abuse that included beatings, sleep deprivation, extreme temperatures and, in some cases, waterboarding, or simulating drowning.

At least five copies of the report were shared with the CIA and top White House officials in 2007 but barred from public release by ICRC guidelines intended to preserve the humanitarian group’s strict policy of neutrality in conflicts. A copy of the report was obtained by Mark Danner, a journalism professor and author who published extensive excerpts in the April 9 edition of the New York Review of Books, released yesterday. He did not say how he obtained the report.

“The ill-treatment to which they were subjected while held in the CIA program, either singly or in combination, constituted torture,” Danner quoted the report as saying.

The Obama Deception

March 14, 2009March 14, 2009 by Infinite

1:51:21 – 12.03.2009
Source: Google Video

CIA destroyed terror interrogation tapes

March 3, 2009 by Infinite

The CIA has admitted to destroying 92 videotapes of interrogation sessions with terrorist suspects.

The revelation that far more tapes had been destroyed than previously acknowledged came in a letter filed by US government lawyers in New York.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking more details of the Bush administration’s terror interrogation programmes following the September 11 attacks.

“The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed. Ninety two videotapes were destroyed,” said the letter written by Lev Dassin, the acting US attorney.

Amrit Singh, an ACLU lawyer, said the CIA should be held in contempt of court for holding back the information for so long.

“The large number of videotapes destroyed confirms that the agency engaged in a systematic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations and to evade the court’s order,” she said in a statement.

The tapes also became a contentious issue in the trial of the September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, after prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then after the trial was over, acknowledged two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.

UN attacks Britain over torture claims

March 1, 2009March 1, 2009 by Infinite

Investigator raises ‘very clear allegations’ that MI5 broke international law

Britain may have broken international law on torture, ministers have been warned by the United Nations. Professor Manfred Nowak, the UN’s special rapporteur on torture, has alerted ministers to a range of concerns, including claims that MI5 officers were complicit in the maltreatment of suspects.

The Austrian law professor warned that Britain has breached the UN convention on torture, and he revealed that he was organising a fact-finding mission to Pakistan, whose security services allegedly tortured terror suspects before the captives were questioned by British intelligence.

It is the first time the UN’s senior torture investigator has directly criticised a British government. Human rights groups said it was highly significant. Clare Algar, executive director of legal charity Reprieve, said: “This is a further significant embarrassment for the British government and reinforces the fact that we really need an independent review into what has been going on.”

Related article: Ministers refuse to answer torture questions (Guardian)

Nowak appeared to criticise the foreign secretary, David Miliband, for blocking the release of US files allegedly confirming MI5 involvement in the torture of British resident Binyam Mohamed. Miliband said releasing the documents could do “real and significant damage” to British national security.