As Spencer Ackerman informs, the long awaited IG Report will be a little longer awaited, and will not be released today. Could be tomorrow, could be next week; what a shocker.
In the meantime, and in keeping with our coordinated push with the ACLU Accountability Project, I would like to draw attention to an article Andy Worthington has out today:
On Friday, I also wrote an article about torture for the ACLU’s Accountability Project, explaining how the hunger strikers at Guantánamo are part of the same torture machine — and, moreover, one that, unnervingly, is still operating today — but as a contribution to the specific topic of demonstrating to the US public, and the wider world, that torture techniques implemented by the Bush administration led to murders in US custody, I’m presenting below some relevant sections from my book The Guantánamo Files, from testimony provided by former prisoner Omar Deghayes, and from a recent report by investigator John Sifton, relating to ten murders in US prisons in Afghanistan, three of which, to the best of my knowledge, have never been investigated at all.
Following the outline proposed by Glenn Greenwald above, some of these murders may have involved a few “rogue” actions, but in general it’s clear that they followed methods authorized at the highest levels of the Bush White House — or variations introduced in a context where limits on abusive behavior had been reduced or eliminated, ostensibly to facilitate interrogation.
The prelude to two notorious murders — and, very possibly, three others — in the US prison at Bagram airbase began in the summer of 2002, when 14 soldiers from the 525th Military Intelligence Brigade at Fort Bragg arrived at the prison, led by Lt. Carolyn Wood, and were soon joined by six Arabic-speaking reservists from the Utah National Guard. Lt. Wood took over interrogations from a team led by an interrogator who later wrote a book about his experiences, The Interrogators, using the pseudonym Chris Mackey. This is how I described what happened next in The Guantánamo Files.
Please, go read the entire article, Andy lays out the case on ten murders in US custody in Afghanistan, taken mostly from his book "The Guantanamo Files," but also including testimony by released Guantanamo prisoner Omar Deghayes and research by John Sifton. It is a damning read.
Marcy is in transit back from New York and I have a couple of things I must work on. Give Andy Worthington a read in the meantime and I will check in.