New Report Reveals How Bush Torture Program Involved Human Experimentation

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by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
7 June, 2010

In a 27-page report, “Experiments in Torture: Human Subject Research and Evidence of Experimentation in the ‘Enhanced’ Interrogation Program” (available here), the organization Physicians for Human Rights has brought into sharp focus the role played by US medical personnel in torture and human experimentation. As the introduction on PHR’s website states, this is “the first report to reveal evidence indicating that CIA medical personnel allegedly engaged in the crime of illegal experimentation after 9/11, in addition to the previously disclosed crime of torture. In their attempt to justify the war crime of torture, the CIA appears to have committed another alleged war crime — illegal experimentation on prisoners.”

What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part Two): Executive Detention, Rendition, Review Boards, Released Prisoners and Trials

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
4 June, 2010

In the first of two articles about the Obama administration’s detention policies relating to the US airbase at Bagram, Afghanistan, I examined recent revelations about a secret prison inside the base, apparently run by a shadowy branch of the Pentagon, where Bush-era “enhanced interrogations,” involving sleep deprivation and isolation, are used, as authorized in Appendix M of the US Army Field Manual. This second article examines the Obama administration’s confusing attempts to bring detention policies at the main prison more in line with international accepted standards regarding the treatment of prisoners seized in wartime, with some spectacular failures — the refusal to accept that foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries should have habeas corpus rights — and some improvements, involving review boards, prisoner releases, and trials, which, nevertheless, betray the kind of confusion that will prevail while the administration insists on accepting its predecessor’s unilateral rewriting of the Geneva Conventions.

What is Obama Doing at Bagram? (Part One): Torture and the “Black Prison”

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by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
3 June, 2010

For eight and a half years, the US prison at Bagram airbase has been the site of a disturbing number of experiments in detention and interrogation, where murders have taken place, the Geneva Conventions have been shredded and the encroachment of the US courts — unlike at Guantánamo — has been thoroughly resisted.

In the last few months, there have been a few improvements — hearings, releases, even the promise of imminent trials — but behind this veneer of respectability, the US government’s unilateral reworking of the Geneva Conventions continues unabated, and evidence has recently surfaced of a secret prison within Bagram, where a torture program that could have been lifted straight from the Bush administration’s rule book is still underway.

House Kills Plan to Close Guantánamo

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by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
25 May, 2010

President Obama’s hopes of closing Guantánamo, which were already gravely wounded by his inability to meet his self-imposed deadline of a year for the prison’s closure, now appear to have been killed off by lawmakers in Congress.

Although the House Armed Services Committee was happy to authorize, by 59 votes to 0, a budget of over $700 billion for war ($567 billion for “defense spending” and $159 billion for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq) for the fiscal year beginning in October, lawmakers unanimously saw through — and turned down — a fraction of this budget for what the administration had labeled a “transfer fund” — money intended to close Guantánamo and buy a new prison in Illinois for prisoners designated for trials or for indefinite detention without charge or trial.

Col. Morris Davis Criticizes Obama on Guantánamo by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
28 April, 2010

I’ve helped unleash a blogging monster! Two weeks ago, I was delighted to receive an email from Morris Davis, the retired Air Force colonel and former chief prosecutor for the Military Commissions at Guantánamo Bay, who resigned when placed in a chain of command under the Pentagon’s General Counsel William J. Haynes II. As he explained in December 2007, Haynes had been involved in “authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques” — in other words, torture — which conflicted with his own insistence that prosecutors in the Military Commissions “would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the [Bush] administration … sanctioned.”

Col. Morris Davis Defends the Rule of Law, Calls for Prosecution for Torturers

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
14 April, 2010

Yesterday, I was delighted to receive an email from Morris Davis, the retired Air Force colonel and former chief prosecutor for the Military Commissions at Guantánamo Bay, who asked if I had a contact at the Huffington Post for an op-ed he had just written defending the importance of the rule of law — and how it applies to everyone — written in a blistering style that America needs more of.

Moe also pulled no punches when it came to explaining why torture is a criminal offense, and why those who authorize it must be prosecuted — an unsurprising, but important opinion, given that he resigned as chief prosecutor when placed in a chain of command under Pentagon counsel Jim Haynes, who, as he explained in December 2007, had been involved in “authorizing the use of the aggressive interrogation techniques” — in other words, torture — which conflicted with his own insistence that prosecutors in the Military Commissions “would not offer any evidence derived by waterboarding, one of the aggressive interrogation techniques the [Bush] administration … sanctioned.”

Lawrence Wilkerson Demolishes Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld’s Lies About Guantánamo

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
13 April, 2010

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Those of us who have been studying the recent career of Col. Lawrence Wilkerson were not surprised when, last week, he submitted a declaration (PDF) in a lawsuit seeking compensation from the US government that was filed by former Guantánamo prisoner Adel Hassan Hamad. A Sudanese hospital worker, Hamad was sold to US forces by their unscrupulous Pakistani allies in the summer of 2002, but was only released from Guantánamo in December 2007.

In the declaration, Col. Wilkerson, who served in the US military for 31 years and was Chief of Staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell from August 2002 until January 2005, stated that George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld all knew — and didn’t care — that “the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were innocent.”

CrossTalk on Gitmo: Morphing injustice – Andy Worthington vs Cully Stimson

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
04 April, 2010

On Tuesday, I was delighted to be invited to a TV studio on a boat on the Thames to take part in “Crosstalk” on Russia Today, hosted by Peter Lavelle. The other guest, who, I believe, was not obliged to endure the most miserable wind and rain to reach the equivalent studio in Washington D.C., was Charles “Cully” Stimson, formerly the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs in the Bush administration, and now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation. A video of the 25-minute show is available below via YouTube:

RussiaToday — April 02, 2010

Seven Years of War in Iraq: Still Based on Cheney’s Torture and Lies

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
21 March, 2010

Friday marked the seventh anniversary of the illegal invasion of Iraq, but by now, it seems, the American people have become used to living in a state of perpetual war, even though that war was based on torture and lies. Protestors rallied across the country on Saturday, but the anti-war impetus of the Bush years has not been regained, as I discovered to my sorrow during a brief US tour in November, when I showed the new documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (directed by Polly Nash and myself) in New York, Washington D.C., and the Bay Area.

Abu Zubaydah’s Torture Diary by Andy Worthington

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by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
16 March, 2010

To coincide with the publication of my article, “What Torture Is, and Why It’s Illegal and Not ‘Poor Judgment,’” in which I revisited the scandalous whitewash of the Justice Department report into the conduct of John Yoo and Jay Bybee (the lawyers who sought to redefine torture in the notorious “torture memos” of August 2002), I reproduce below a transcript of the statements made by the “high-value detainee” Abu Zubaydah during interviews with representatives of the International Committee of the Red Cross, following his transfer to Guantánamo from secret CIA prisons in September 2006.

The Black Hole of Guantánamo by Andy Worthington

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
3 March, 2010

When it comes to dealing with the thorny question of how to close Guantánamo, the remaining prisoners have been caught between two competing systems since President Obama took office last January, and the result, to put it mildly, has been confusing.

Under President Bush, prisoners were cleared for release by military review boards, established to review the supposed evidence against them, and to determine whether they constituted an ongoing threat to the US. This appeared to be a maddeningly arbitrary system, but it led to the release of hundreds of the prisoners.

Torture Whitewash: How “Professional Misconduct” Became “Poor Judgment” in the OPR Report

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
23 February, 2010

The long-awaited report by the OPR (the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility) into the conduct of the lawyers in the OLC (Office of Legal Counsel), regarding their role in approving the use of torture, has finally been published (PDF).

The report largely focuses on two memos dated August 1, 2002, and a third dated March 14, 2003. Widely known as the “torture memos,” these notorious documents sought to redefine torture so that it could be used by the CIA (and by the US military in the March 2003 memo), and the report concludes that the primary author of the memos, John Yoo, an OLC lawyer who is now a law professor at Boalt Hall, the University of California’s School of Law in Berkeley, and the senior official who signed the August 2002 memos, Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee, who is now a judge in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, were guilty of “professional misconduct.”

Binyam Mohamed on Omar Khadr: A Scapegoat for a Failed “War on Terror”

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
16 February, 2010

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Last week, while the UK Court of Appeal was shining a spotlight on the case of Binyam Mohamed, ordering details of his torture by US agents to be revealed to the public, Binyam himself — a British resident, subjected to “extraordinary rendition” and torture, who was released from Guantánamo last February — was thinking about someone else.

Binyam was thinking about Omar Khadr, the Canadian citizen, who was just 15 years old when he was seized after a firefight in Afghanistan in July 2002, and who now faces a trial in the much-criticized Military Commission trial system that was ill-advisedly resuscitated and revived by the Obama administration and Congress last summer. I have written extensively about Khadr’s case (and would be delighted if you checked out one of my favorite articles here), and was dismayed when Attorney General Eric Holder announced in November that Omar Khadr would face a trial by Military Commission.

Defending Moazzam Begg and Amnesty International

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
10 February, 2010

Just when it seemed that Republicans in America had a monopoly on Islamophobic hysteria, the Sunday Times prompted a torrent of similar hysteria in the UK by running an article in which an employee of Amnesty International — Gita Sahgal, head of the gender unit at the International Secretariat — criticized the organization that employed her for its association with former Guantánamo prisoner Moazzam Begg.

Before getting into the substance — or lack of it — in Sahgal’s complaints, it should be noted first of all that her immediate suspension by Amnesty was the least that should have been expected. What other organization would put up with an employee badmouthing them to a national newspaper on a Sunday, and then allow them to return to work as usual on Monday morning?

Bagram: Graveyard of the Geneva Conventions

by Andy Worthington
Featured Writer
Dandelion Salad
www.andyworthington.co.uk
5 February, 2010

On January 15, 2010, the Pentagon released the first ever list of prisoners held in the Bagram Theater Internment Facility, the main US prison in Afghanistan for the last eight years (PDF). An annotated version of the list is available here. In a previous article, “Dark Revelations in the Bagram Prisoner List,” I examined the stories of the foreign prisoners rendered to Bagram from other countries, and described the legal challenges mounted on their behalf, explaining how, last March, three of these men won their habeas corpus petitions in a US court, in a ruling that has been challenged by the Obama administration.

I also explained the use of a secret facility within Bagram as part of a network of secret CIA prisons in Afghanistan, and asked pointed questions about the whereabouts of a number of men, known to have been held in secret prisons in Afghanistan, who are not on the list and whose apparent disappearance has never been explained — and also covered this topic in another recent article, “UN Secret Detention Report Asks, ‘Where Are The CIA Ghost Prisoners?’”