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Jose Rodriguez’ Idea of “Ugly Visuals”: Blank and Altered Tapes

Jose Rodriguez, not exactly a squeamish guy, is spreading a myth that the reason he destroyed the torture tapes was because the torture depicted on them was so bad that people would kill CIA officers in response to the violence

Especially after the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal, Rodriguez writes, if the CIA’s videos were to leak out, officers worldwide would be in danger.

“I wasn’t going to sit around another three years waiting for people to get up the courage,” to do what CIA lawyers said he had the authority to do himself, Rodriguez writes. He describes sending the order in November 2005 as “just getting rid of some ugly visuals.”

Except there’s a problem with that claim.

The problem with the torture tapes is not what they showed, but what they didn’t show. Such as the two separate waterboarding sessions that were, for some reason, not captured on tape at all.

OIG found 11 interrogation tapes to be blank. Two others were blank except for one or two minutes of recording. Two others were broken and could not be reviewed. OIG compared the videotapes to logs and cables and identified a 21-hour period of time” which included two waterboard sessions” that was not captured on the videotapes.

Or the way many of the tapes showed some sign of tampering that hid their content.

[Redacted] for many of the tapes one 1/2 or 3/4 of the tape “there was nothing.” [Redacted] on some tapes it was apparent that the VCR had been turned off and then turned back on right away. [Redacted] on other tapes the video quality was poor and on others the tape had been reused (taped over) or not recorded at all. [Redacted] The label on some tapes read “interrogation session,” but when viewed there was just snow. [Redaction] did not make note of this in [redaction] report. [Redaction] estimated that “half a dozen” videotapes had been taped over or were “snowy.”

In other words, the tapes probably didn’t show the worst torture sessions. On the contrary, the tapes were enduring proof that the torturers tampered with the tapes to make sure they didn’t show the torture sessions.

Apparently, Jose Rodriguez thinks a bunch of snowy taped over tapes–proof that the torturers covered up evidence of what they did–constitutes “ugly visuals.” And I guess it does, but not in the way he’s claiming in his book.

George Tenet’s Bureaucratic CYA

Let me divert from my obsession on the CIA’s efforts to hide references to what I believe is the September 17, 2001 Memorandum of Notification authorizing torture and a whole lot else to talk about what a neat bureaucratic trick George Tenet pulled. As I’ve confirmed, what the CIA is going to some length to hide is the second half of the title of the document George Tenet drew up to try to impose some kind of controls on the CIA’s torture program in January 2003. The title reads, “Guidelines on Interrogations Conducted Pursuant to the” with the authorities that authorize such interrogations redacted.

But let’s take a step back and put that document–with its now highly sensitive invocation of the authorities on which the torture program rested–in context.

As far as I’m aware, unlike Michael Hayden and John Rizzo, Tenet has not publicly confirmed a Presidential Memorandum of Notification authorized the torture program. In his memoir, he describes a briefing he conducted on September 15, 2001, two days before Bush signed the MON. He describes asking for authority to detain al Qaeda figures.

We raised the importance of being able to detain unilaterally al-Qa’ida operatives around the world.

He also pitched using drones to kill al Qaeda operatives.

We suggested using armed Predator UAVs to kill Bin Laden’s key lieutenants, and using our contacts around the world to pursue al-Qa’ida’s sources of funding, through identifying non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and individuals who funded terrorist operations.

And he describes a whole bunch of other asks, like partnering with the Uzbekistan and–as part of another ask–with Syria and Libya. In short, Tenet describes asking for authorization to do the things we know are included in that MON.

Then, he describes watching Bush kick off the war on September 20, reflecting,

By then, as I remember, the president had already granted us the broad operational authority I had asked for.

Well, sucks to be Tenet, because as it happens, Bush authorized those activities broadly, but never put in writing that the authorization to detain al Qaeda figures included the authorization to torture

A few days after the attacks, President Bush signed a top-secret directive to CIA authorizing an unprecedented array of covert actions against Al Qaeda and its leadership. Read more

Leon Panetta and the Pakistani Doctor: Yet More Double Standards on Classified Information

As the Bill Gertz article I reexamined the other day made clear, Leon Panetta became personally involved in the CIA’s efforts to investigate detainee lawyers who were trying to track down their clients’ torturers.

CIA Director Leon E. Panetta and his chief of staff, Jeremy Bash, a former chief counsel for the House intelligence committee, at first were unaware of both the scope and seriousness of the case.

However, both officials began addressing the matter after inquiries were made from members of Congress. Since then, Mr. Panetta and Mr. Bash are getting regular updates on the dispute, said the officials.

As a result of that investigation, former CIA officer John Kiriakou was charged last week.

Consider the damage Kiriakou is alleged to have done:

  • Some lawyers with Top Secret clearance submitted a sealed filing naming a covert officer involved in the torture of 9/11 defendants. The lawyers pointedly did not photograph this officer in an effort to shield his identity. And his name was never made public.
  • Using information gained from Kiriakou and around 23 other sources (including former CIA Executive Director Buzzy Krongard), Scott Shane wrote an article detailing Deuce Martinez’ role in the interrogation of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others. And while Martinez’ association with the torture program was classified, his identity was not. Furthermore, by the time of the article, Martinez was working for Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell’s contracting firm, making it a pretty safe bet that he was involved in interrogation, even interrogations involving torture.
  • Subsequent to this article based on information from Kiriakou and 23 other people, the 9/11 detainees saw pictures of Martinez; assuming Shane’s article is accurate, they had already interacted with Martinez personally.
  • In that article, Shane included details about the “magic box” technology used to locate Abu Zubaydah. Information on that “magic box” technology and similar ones has been publicly available for decades, meaning the only secret here is that CIA uses it (!) and called it something as stupid as “magic box.”

That’s it. That’s the reported outcome of John Kiriakou’s leaks. And for that he faces prison time of up to 20 years.

Meanwhile, tomorrow the above clip will be shown on 60 Minutes, showing Panetta confirming that the Pakistani doctor who conducted fake vaccinations in Abbottabad, Pakistan in order to get a glimpse into Osama bin Laden’s compound was, in fact, working for the CIA.

Panetta also acknowledged that Shikal Afridi, the Pakistani doctor conducting health tests in the village in an effort to collect DNA and verify bin Laden’s presence, was in fact working for the U.S. Afridi was arrested and charged with treason by the government of Pakistan. “I’m very concerned about what the Pakistanis did with this individual…who in fact helped provide intelligence that was very helpful with regards to this operation,” says Panetta. “He was not in any way treasonous towards Pakistan…Pakistan and the United States have a common cause here against terrorism…and for them to take this kind of action against somebody who was helping to go after terrorism, I just think is a real mistake on their part,” he tells Pelley.

Not only does this presumably put more pressure on Pakistan to convict Afridi of treason (he remains in custody), but it exacerbates the problem of having used a vaccination campaign as cover in the first place, confirming on the record that similar campaigns in poor countries might be no more than a CIA front.

I presume someone in the White House gave Panetta permission to go blab this on 60 Minutes; I assume he’s in no more legal jeopardy than Dick Cheney was when he insta-declassified Valerie Plame’s identity.

But shit like this discredits every single claim national security experts make about the need for secrecy. I mean, how are CIA officers ever going to recruit any more assets when the assets know that the CIA director may, at some time in the future that’s politically convenient, go on 60 Minutes and confirm the relationship?

How Did DOJ Find Jon Kiriakou?

As I’ve noted, former CIA officer Jon Kiriakou was charged yesterday with leaking classified material–including one covert officer’s identity; the alleged leaks involve three different journalists. Since the complaint focuses on Kiriakou it’s easy to forget that the investigation didn’t start there: rather–it started with a filing submitted in a detainee defense case (almost certainly the 9/11 detainees) and photos found in some detainees’ cells, and went through at least one journalist (called Journalist A) along the way. So how did Patrick Fitzgerald’s team find Kiriakou? Did Fitzgerald obtain journalists’ contacts again?

In the case of Kiriakou, I don’t think so. At least not directly.

The complaint alleges there were two steps from Jon Kiriakou to the filing and the photographs.

Covert Officer A

  1. On August 19, 2008 Kiriakou gave Journalist A Covert Officer A’s name.
  2. Later the same day, Journalist A gave Covert Officer A’s name to the defense investigator.
  3. On January 19, 2009, the defense team submits a filing including Covert Officer A’s name.

Deuce Martinez

  1. On November 12, 2007, Kiriakou gave Journalist A Deuce Martinez’ personal email address. On May 20, 2008, Kiriakou told Journalist A that Martinez was not trained in torture. On November 17, 2008, Kiriakou told Journalist A some details about how Martinez traveled, presumably to a Black Site.
  2. On April 10, 2008, Journalist A gave a defense team investigator Martinez’ home phone number.
  3. The defense team had pictures taken of Martinez and gave them to detainees as part of a double blind identification effort; the pictures were found in “spring 2009.”

Note, the evidence in the complaint that Kiriakou was Journalist A’s source on Martinez is weaker than for Covert Officer A’s identity or that he was Scott Shane’s source for Martinez’ phone number. The complaint shows that Journalist A provided the phone number to the defense investigator, but does not show compellingly that Journalist A’s source of Martinez’ phone number was Kiriakou. That weak spot in their case is one piece of evidence that Fitzgerald’s team has neither interviewed Journalist A nor obtained his or her phone records to rule out other possible sources.

Now, remember, by the time DOJ started investigating this on March 19, 2009 (when the target was detainee lawyers, not their sources), and by the time Fitzgerald started investigating this on March 8, 2010, Scott Shane (who is described as Journalist B in the complaint) had already published this June 22, 2008 story, describing Deuce Martinez’ role in catching Abu Zubaydah and interrogating Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others. It was sourced to,

The two dozen current and former American and foreign intelligence officials interviewed for this article offered a tantalizing but incomplete description of the C.I.A. detention program. [my emphasis]

In addition to Buzzy Krongard, Jon Kiriakou is the only on the record source. The story reveals that Kiriakou spoke with Shane in December 2007–the same month he spoke about waterboarding with ABC. But it also suggests Shane spoke with him after that, when he learned Kiriakou had been “cautioned … not to discuss classified matters.”

John C. Kiriakou, a former C.I.A. counterterrorism officer who was the first to question Abu Zubaydah, expressed such conflicted views when he spoke publicly to ABC News and other news organizations late last year. In a December interview with The Times, before being cautioned by the C.I.A. not to discuss classified matters, Read more

Will the CIA Regret It Started a Witchhunt against Detainee Lawyers?

As I noted, DOJ charged former CIA officer Jon Kiriakou for allegedly leaking information relating to the CIA’s torture program (as well as purportedly secret information about GPS tracking that is not secret).

But remember how this investigation started: as an effort to implicate Gitmo detainees’ lawyers.

1) DOJ has been investigating the John Adams Project since last August to find out how photographs of torturers got into the hands of detainees at Gitmo. The JAP has employed a Private Investigator to track down likely interrogators of detainees, to take pictures, get a positive ID, and once done, call those interrogators as witnesses in legal proceedings. DOJ appears concerned that JAP may have made info–learned confidentially in the course of defending these detainees–available to those detainees, and therefore violated the protective order that all defense attorneys work under. Yet JAP says they collected all the info independently, which basically means the contractors in question just got caught using bad tradecraft.

2) DOJ appears to believe no crime was committed and was preparing a report to say as much for John Brennan, who will then brief Obama on it.

3) But CIA cried foul at DOJ’s determination, claiming that because one of the lawyers involved, Donald Vieira, is a former Democratic House Intelligence staffer, he is biased.  They seem to be suggesting that Vieira got briefed on something while at HPSCI that has biased him in this case, yet according to the CIA’s own records, he was not involved in any of the more explosive briefings on torture (so the claim is probably bullshit in any case). After CIA accused Vieira of bias, he recused himself from the investigation.

4) So apparently to replace Vieira and attempt to retain some hold on DOJ’s disintegrating prosecutorial discretion, DOJ brought in Patrick Fitzgerald to pick up with the investigation. Fitz, of course, a) has impeccable national security credentials, and b) has the most experience in the country investigating the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, having investigated the Torturer-in-Chief and his Chief of Staff for outing CIA spy Valerie Plame. In other words, DOJ brought in a guy whom CIA can’t bitch about, presumably to shut down this controversy, not inflame it.

Now, it appears that the CIA’s concerns were included in the memo to Brennan over DOJ’s wishes. Or perhaps Fitz is just going to review the case. And if the JAP people did, as they say, use only external information to ID these torturers, then they are likely legally safe and the involvement of Fitz is simply going to quiet down the controversy.

The investigation appears to have led to Kiriakou by tracing backwards through–presumably–John Sifton (who led the John Adams Project work) to his source, an as-yet unidentified journalist, and from him to Kiriakou.

Now, as a threshold matter, the investigation completely exonerated the detainee lawyers.

According to the complaint affidavit, the investigation determined that no laws were broken by the defense team as no law prohibited defense counsel from filing a classified document under seal outlining for a court classified information they had learned during the course of their investigation. Read more

DOJ Charges Former CIA Officer for Exposing CIA’s Torture

It would be too simple to say that Jon Kiriakou was a whistle-blower. His initial leaks to journalists seemed like sanctioned leaks to minimize the effect torture had.

But whatever role he played, DOJ just charged him for leaking information–almost certainly about the Abu Zubaydah torture–to journalists.

A former CIA officer, John Kiriakou, was charged today with repeatedly disclosing classified information to journalists, including the name of a covert CIA officer and information revealing the role of another CIA employee in classified activities, Justice Department officials announced.

The charges result from an investigation that was triggered by a classified defense filing in January 2009, which contained classified information the defense had not been given through official government channels, and, in part, by the discovery in the spring of 2009 of photographs of certain government employees and contractors in the materials of high-value detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The investigation revealed that on multiple occasions, one of the journalists to whom Kiriakou is alleged to have illegally disclosed classified information, in turn, disclosed that information to a defense team investigator, and that this information was reflected in the classified defense filing and enabled the defense team to take or obtain surveillance photographs of government personnel. There are no allegations of criminal activity by any members of the defense team for the detainees.

I’ll have more shortly. But one thing to remember is that Lanny Breuer represented Kiriakou in the two years leading up to 2009. And Patrick Fitzgerald is the prosecutor on this case.

Update: Here’s the NYT story cited in the press release. It’s a Scott Shane article on Deuce Martinez.

Update: Here’s one detail Kiriakou is alleged to have leaked (the quote is from the Shane story).

Armed with Abu Zubaydah’s cellphone number, eavesdropping specialists deployed what some called the “magic box,” an electronic scanner that could track any switched-on mobile phone and give its approximate location. But Abu Zubaydah was careful about security: he turned his phone on only briefly to collect messages, not long enough for his trackers to get a fix on his whereabouts. [my emphasis]

First of all, this information was readily available–they will have an interesting time proving this was classified. But I find it particularly ironic given the Jones decision that came down today.

Update: I’ve corrected the title and text to indicate that Kiriakou was charged, but not yet indicted.

Jon Kyl Justifies Military Detention by Claiming CIA-Military Credit for FBI Interrogations

In the entire two week debate over the detainee provisions of the Defense Authorization, the champions of military detention offered almost no rationale for it (a pity, then, that the opponents barely explained why it’s such a bad idea), aside from Lindsey Graham repeating endlessly that detainees shouldn’t get lawyers (he never explained how this claim jived with his promise that every detainee would have access to habeas corpus).

One exception is a statement that Jon Kyl submitted to the record but did not read (the statement starts on PDF 5). After reasserting the legality of the detainee provisions under Hamdi, Kyl’s (was it Kyl’s?) statement offered an “explanation” for military detention; I’ve reproduced that part of the statement in full below the line.

Now, the statement doesn’t make any sense. It invokes what it claims were CIA interrogations and treats them as military interrogation; though in fact a number of the interrogations the statement invokes were FBI interrogations.

The statement claims detainees wouldn’t have a lawyer, though the architects of the bill have made it clear (as has SCOTUS) detainees would have access to habeas corpus and therefore (presumably) lawyers.

Perhaps not surprising, the statement also invokes two discredited pieces of propaganda: Vice Admiral Lowell Jacoby’s January 9, 2003 Declaration in opposition to granting Jose Padilla habeas corpus and George Bush’s September 6, 2006 speech announcing he was moving 14 high value detainees to Gitmo.

It relies on Jacoby’s statement to argue for the value of a “relationship of dependency,” which seems to no more than a rebranding of Bruce Jessen’s “learned helplessness.” And note, Jacoby’s statement, written six months after DOD took custody of Padilla, spoke of intelligence he might offer prospectively; it doesn’t claim to have gotten any intelligence using this “relationship of dependency.”

And it relies on Bush’s statement to claim that military or CIA interrogations exposed that KSM was Mukhtar and Jose Padilla’s plans, both of which came from Ali Soufan’s FBI interrogation of Zubaydah. It also claims the CIA interrogations yielded Ramzi bin al-Shibh’s location, whereas Soufan, at least, claims that came from an FBI interrogation in Bagram. And it claims CIA’s interrogation of KSM revealed the Liberty Towers plot that had been broken up a year earlier. In other words, Kyl’s argument for why we need military detention consists of repeating discredited propaganda claiming CIA credit for interrogations largely conducted by the FBI. The same FBI officers who will lose their ability to interrogate detainees if and when this bill goes into place.

In short, one of the most comprehensive arguments for why we need military detention instead makes the case for retaining FBI primacy. At the same time, it appears to endorse the “learned helplessness” that ended up making delaying any value to KSM and other detainee interrogations.

Even the champions of military detention offer proof that we’re safer with civilian detention.

What follows is the statement Kyl submitted to the record.


Wahy Military Detention Is Necessary: To Allow Intelligence Gathering That Will Prevent Future Terrorist Attacks Against the American People

Some may ask, why does it matter whether a person who has joined Al Qaeda is held in military custody or is placed in the civilian court system? One critical reason is intelligence gathering. A terrorist operative held in military custody can be effectively interrogated. In the civilian system, however, that same terrorist would be given a lawyer, and the first thing that lawyer will tell his client is, “don’t say anything. We can fight this.”

In military custody, by contrast, not only are there no lawyers for terrorists. The indefinite nature of the detention–it can last as long as the war continues–itself creates conditions that allow effective interrogation. It creates the relationship of dependency and trust that experienced interrogators have made clear is critical to persuading terrorist detainees to talk.

Navy Vice-Admiral Lowell Jacoby, who at the time was the Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, explained how military custody is critical to effective interrogation in a declaration that he submitted in the Padilla litigation. He emphasized that successful noncoercive interrogation takes time–and it requires keeping the detainee away from lawyers.

Vice-Admiral Jacoby stated:

DIA’s approach to interrogation is largely dependent upon creating an atmosphere of dependency and trust between the subject and the interrogator. Developing the kind of relationship of trust and dependency necessary for effective interrogations is a process that can take a significant amount of time. There are numerous examples of situations where interrogators have been unable to obtain valuable intelligence from a subject until months, or, even years, after the interrogation process began.

Anything that threatens the perceived dependency and trust between the subject and interrogator directly threatens the value of interrogation as an intelligence gathering tool. Even seemingly minor interruptions can have profound psychological impacts on the delicate subject/interrogator relationship. Any insertion of counsel into the subject-interrogator relationship, for example–even if only for a limited duration or for a specific purpose–can undo months of work and may permanently shut down the interrogation process.

Specifically with regard to Jose Padilla, Vice Admiral Jacoby also noted in his Declaration that: “Providing [Padilla] access to counsel now would create expectations by Padilla that his ultimate release may be obtained through an adversarial civil litigation process. This would break–probably irreparably–the sense of dependency and trust that the interrogators are attempting to create.”

In other words, military custody is critical to successful interrogation. Once a terrorist detainee is transferred to the civilian court system, the conditions for successful interrogation are destroyed.

Preventing the detention of U.S. citizens who collaborate with Al Qaeda would be a historic abandonment of the law of war. And, by preventing effective interrogation of these collaborators, it would likely have severe consequences for our ability to prevent future terrorist attacks against the American people.

We know from cold, hard experience that successful interrogation is critical to uncovering information that will prevent future attacks against civilians.

On September 6 of 2006, when President Bush announced the transfer of 14 high-value terrorism detainees to Guantanamo, he also described information that the United States had obtained by interrogating these detainees. Abu Zubaydah was captured by U.S. forces several months after the September 11 attacks. Under interrogation, he revealed that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the principal organizer of the September 11 attacks. This is information that the United States did not already know–and that we only obtained through the successful military interrogation of Zubaydah.

Zubaydah also described a terrorist attack that Al Qaida operatives were planning to launch inside this country–an attack of which the United States had no previous knowledge. Zubaydah described the operatives involved in this attack and where they were located. This information allowed the United States to capture these operatives–one while he was traveling to the United States.

Again, just imagine what might have happened if the Feinstein amendment had already been law, and if the Congress had stripped away the executive branch’s ability to hold Al Qaeda collaborators in military custody and interrogate them. We simply would not learn what that detainee knows–including any knowledge that he may have of planned future terrorist attacks.

Under military interrogation, Abu Zubaydah also revealed the identity of another September 11 plotter, Ramzi bin al Shibh, and provided information that led to his capture. U.S. forces then interrogated bin al Shibh. Information that both he and Zubaydah provided helped lead to the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Under interrogation, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed provided information that helped stop another planned terrorist attack on the United States. K.S.M. also provided information that led to the capture of a terrorist named Zubair. And K.S.M.’s interrogation also led to the identification and capture of an entire 17-member Jemaah Islamiya terrorist cell in Southeast Asia.

Information obtained from interrogation of terrorists detained by the United States also helped to stop a planned truck-bomb attack on U.S. troops in Djibouti. Interrogation helped stop a planned car-bomb attack on the U.S. embassy in Pakistan. And it helped stop a plot to hijack passengers planes and crash them into Heathrow airport in London.

As President Bush stated in his September 6, 2006 remarks, “[i]nformation from terrorists in CIA custody has played a role in the capture or questioning of nearly every senior al Qaida member or associate detained by the U.S. and its allies.” The President concluded by noting that Al Qaida members subjected to interrogation by U.S. forces: “have painted a picture of al Qaeda’s structure and financing, and communications and logistics. They identified al Qaeda’s travel routes and safe havens, and explained how al Qaeda’s senior leadership communicates with its operatives in places like Iraq. They provided information that ….. has allowed us to make sense of documents and computer records that we have seized in terrorist raids. They’ve identified voices in recordings of intercepted calls, and helped us understand the meaning of potentially critical terrorist communications.

[Were it not for information obtained through interrogation], our intelligence community believes that al Qaeda and its allies would have succeeded in launching another attack against the American homeland. By giving us information about terrorist plans we could not get anywhere else, this [interrogation] program has saved innocent lives.”

If the Feinstein amendment were adopted, this is all information that we would be unable to obtain if the Al Qaeda collaborator that our forces had captured was a U.S. citizen. It would simply be impossible to effectively interrogate that Al Qaeda collaborator–the relationship of trust and dependency that military custody creates would be broken, and the detainee would instead have a lawyer telling him to be quiet. And we know that information obtained by interrogating Al Qaeda detainees has been by far the most valuable source of information for preventing future terrorist attacks.

Again, in every past war, our forces have had the ability to capture, detain, and interrogate U.S. citizens who collaborate with the enemy or join forces with the enemy. I would submit that in this war, intelligence gathering is more critical than ever. Al Qaeda doesn’t hold territory that we can capture. It operates completely outside the rules of war, and directly targets innocent civilians. Our only effective weapon against Al Qaeda is intelligence gathering. And the Feinstein amendment threatens to take away that weapon–to take away our best defense for preventing future terrorist attacks against the American people. [my emphasis]

The Gitmo Files: Abu Zubaydah’s File

As bmaz posted, WikiLeaks is (finally) releasing the Gitmo Files, review files on 758 of the detainees who have passed through Gitmo. For background, here’s the story Carol Rosenberg (with Tom Lasseter) wrote about the files. Among other things, they write about the “mission creep” at Gitmo, as people unrelated to al Qaeda were flown there in an attempt to extract intelligence.

There’s not a whiff in the documents that any of the work is leading the U.S. closer to capturing Bin Laden. In fact, the documents suggest a sort of mission creep beyond the post-9/11 goal of hunting down the al Qaida inner circle and sleeper cells.

The file of one captive, now living in Ireland, shows he was sent to Guantanamo so that U.S. military intelligence could gather information on the secret service of Uzbekistan. A man from Bahrain is shipped to Guantanamo in June 2002, in part, for interrogation on “personalities in the Bahraini court.”

That same month, U.S. troops in Bagram airlifted to Guantanamo a 30-something sharecropper whom Pakistani security forces scooped up along the Afghan border as he returned home from his uncle’s funeral.

The idea was that, once at Guantanamo, 8,000 miles from his home, he might be able to tell interrogators about covert travel routes through the Afghan-Pakistan mountain region. Seven months later, the Guantanamo intelligence analysts concluded that he wasn’t a risk to anyone — and had no worthwhile information. Pentagon records show they shipped him home in March 2003, after more than two years in either American or Pakistani custody.

Apparently, Dick Cheney was so afraid of Afghan sharecroppers he had to build a camp to hold them.

As a way of assessing the files, I wanted to start with Abu Zubaydah’s file, since we have a good deal of information on him via other means. And it’s clear that AZ’s file, at least, is full of euphemism and half truths. One thing the report is clearly not: an attempt to get at the truth of the matter.

Before I get into the deceptions written into this report, note the admission the report makes on page 13 (of 14):

Detainee is assessed to be of HIGH intelligence value. Due to detainee’s HVD status, detainee has yet to be interviewed.

That is, the people writing this report apparently had never even interviewed AZ, more than two years after he passed into their custody.

The distance between those writing the summary and the information described in the report may explain the seeming contradictions in it. Consider how the report treats whether AZ was or was not a member of al Qaeda. The Executive Summary reports,

Detainee is a senior member of al-Qaida with direct ties to multiple high-ranking terrorists such as Usama Bin Laden (UBL).

Yet of course, AZ has revealed that his guards admitted this is not true. The very next line of the summary provides information that is true.

Detainee has a vast amount of information regarding al-Qaida personnel and operations and is an admitted operational planner, financier and facilitator of international terrorists and their activities.

Though note how the file doesn’t say that AZ is not an “admitted operational planner” for al Qaeda?

The body of the report later admits that AZ’s application to Al Qaeda was rejected.

Detainee submitted the requisite paperwork to join al-Qaida and pledge bayat (an oath of allegiance) to UBL. Detainee’s application to al-Qaida was rejected.

Note that the report doesn’t explain whether AZ tried to apply to al Qaeda before or after 1992, when (as the report admits) AZ suffered a head wound that caused his cognitive impairment? Even here, though, the report seems to cover up contradictory information.

In approximately 1992 or 1993, detainee sustained a head wound from shrapnel while on the front lines.8 Detainee stated he had to relearn fundamentals such as walking, talking, and writing; as such, he was therefore considered worthless to al-Qaida. Detainee asked Abu Burhan al-Suri for permission to repeat the Khaldan Camp training. Detainee did not pledge bayat to UBL and did not become a full al-Qaida member. Detainee refused to make the pledge unless al-Qaida agreed to stage an attack inside Israel or mount an operation to help free Shaykh Umar Abd al-Rahman aka (the Blind Shaykh).9

That is, the report suggests that al Qaeda rejected AZ’s application because he was “worthless” to al Qaeda. But it appears that AZ also refused to join al Qaeda because it did not meet his his priority–attacking Israel (remember, he’s Palestinian). AZ himself has said there were other differences in approach between him and al Qaeda (notably, on the topic of attacking innocent civilians), but the report doesn’t describe them.

Also note, the report makes no other mention–none!–of AZ’s cognitive impairments that remained from that injury and which were almost certainly exacerbated by the torture he underwent in 2002. Indeed, the report says AZ is in good health, though he suffers from seizures.

And the report doesn’t even try to explain the discrepancy between its explanation that al Qaeda found him worthless and the other detainees who said he was a member of al Qaeda.

Detainee continues to deny being a member of al-Qaida. However, multiple sources and other al-Qaida members have identified detainee as an al-Qaida member.

Now, the report does explain this in detail, with references to the sources (I’ll return to this in the future, but just as an example of the problems with their evidence, they refer to Zarqawi as an al Qaeda commander, even though he didn’t become one until long after AZ was captured; also, they refer to what Ahmed Ressam said about AZ, without noting he recanted much of his testimony or describing whether Ressam had means to know the organizational structure of al Qaeda). The most important of these sources is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (whom they refer in the body of the report as KU-10024).

Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, ISN US9KU-010024DP (KU-10024) identified detainee as a senior al-Qaida lieutenant.16 KU-10024 and detainee each played key roles in facilitating travel for al-Qaida operatives.17

Now the first of those citations is to an interrogation report. But the second one is to (!) the 9/11 Commission Report. So this Gitmo report relies on analysis conducted by a bunch of people who suspected–but didn’t know–that KSM was tortured, relying in part on those tortured interrogation reports, to confirm one key tie between AZ and al Qaeda.

Read more

The Secrets Military Commissions Keep that Civilian Courts Don’t

As I mentioned in my earlier post on the new Gitmo protective order, DOD is reportedly preparing to charge Abd al Rahim al-Nashiri for his role in the Cole bombing for trial in a military commission. That’s worth keeping in mind because the Gitmo order is largely based on the protective order the DC District Court uses for habeas cases. The Gitmo order chose not to simply adopt the DC District order, though, suggesting the differences may have been crafted for people like al-Nashiri.

While some of the changes are just procedural, others are more telling. A central difference is the assertion that everything a High Value Detainee says will be presumptively treated as Top Secret/SCI (an update to the DC District order, issued before Abu Zubaydah’s lawyers got materials in his habeas case, includes treatment of TS/SCI information). So anything al-Nashiri tells his attorney about the torture he suffered–including the torture still allegedly being investigated by DOJ–will be considered TS/SCI.

In a similar vein, the prohibition on sharing detainee statements in classified documents I mentioned earlier is an addition to the DC District order.

Statements of the detainee that detainee’s counsel acquires from classified documents cannot be shared with the detainee absent authorization from the appropriate government agency authorized to declassify the classified information.

Curiously, the Gitmo order includes an extra requirement before attorneys get access to classified information: that the attorney,

provid[e] to the Chief Defense Counsel detailed verifiable information regarding past employment, including a list of prior case assignments, to ensure against any conflicts of interest with the case to which detainee’s counsel is currently assigned.

I’m very interested in what “conflicts of interest” they have in mind. Particularly as it relates to al-Nashiri, remember that there was a JAG investigation into whether Kirk Lippold acted improperly in the USS Cole attack (the investigation was designed not to look at larger questions about rules of engagement because they would reflect badly on our allies in Yemen). In addition, one of the CIA’s first uses of a drone to kill someone–with the supposed “accidental” killing of US citizen Kamal Derwish at the same time–was in the killing of Abu Ali al-Harithi. I would imagine the government would want to make sure al-Nashiri’s attorneys are completely ignorant about certain details of both of these events. That said, the restriction may well be about making sure attorneys don’t know too much about other detainees. In any case, they seem to be using “conflict of interest” where they really want to deprive attorneys who “know too much” of serving as counsel.

The Gitmo order also eliminates a caveat included in the DC order. In the rule prohibiting attorneys from sharing certain information with their clients,

Written and oral communications with a detainee, including all incoming legal mail, shall not include information relating to any ongoing or completed military, intelligence, security, or law enforcement operations, investigations, or arrests, or the results of such activities, by any nation or agency or current political events in any country that are not directly related to counsel’s representation of that detainee; or security procedures at GTMO, including names of U.S. Government personnel and the layout of camp facilities, or the status of other detainees, not directly related to counsel’s representation. [my emphasis]

… the Gitmo order eliminates the exception in cases where this information relates to the lawyers representation of the detainee. I’m particularly interested in this given that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed named detainees whom he had implicated under torture, insisting they were innocent. Preventing any discussion of the status of other detainees would prevent such public revelations at a military commission.

The Gitmo order also includes a prohibition on sharing of information between detainees.

No materials, either Legal Mail or non-Legal Mail, are permitted to be exchanged directly between detainees unless authorized by the JTF-GTMO Commander or, after referral, the military judge. If a detainee in a military commission is authorized to proceed pro se, the military judge may authorize special procedures to facilitate the exchange of information necessary for a pro se detainee to prepare a defense. However, all written materials provided to a pro se detainee must be first reviewed by the Privilege Team under the same standards applicable to detainees represented by counsel.

Much of this order–and this restriction in particular–seems to be a response to the John Adams project, which collected photos of detainees torturers and in some case had them exchanging photos among themselves.

Finally, while the DC order ensured that the content both face-to-face and phone conversations between an attorneys and their client could not be monitored, the Gitmo order explicitly permits the recording of phone calls between lawyers and their clients.

Any telephonic access by detainee’s counsel is subject to appropriate security procedures, including contemporaneous monitoring and recording. Any telephonic access between detainee’s counsel and a detainee over either secure or non-secure systems may be subject to appropriate security procedures, including contemporaneous monitoring and recording by the Privilege Team. [my emphasis]

Mind you, as CCR’s suit about the wiretapping of attorney-client conversations shows, they’ve been doing this all along anyway. But now they’re making it explicit.

Playing God with Bradley Manning

Back in 2002, Gitmo’s Standard Operating Procedures advocated stripping detainees of clothing as a way of demonstrating the omnipotence of the captors.

In addition to degradation of the detainee, stripping can be used to demonstrate the omnipotence of the captor or to debilitate the detainee.

With Abu Zubaydah–as Jane Mayer has written–they explicitly tied this to becoming his “God.”

… the CIA interrogators also announced they planned to become Zubaydah’s “God.” They reportedly took his clothing as punishment, and reduced his human interaction to a single daily visit in which they would say simply, “You know what I want,” and then leave.

That’s striking given that–according to Bradley Manning’s Article 138 complaint, written in his own voice–Commander James Averhart put Manning on suicide watch on January 18 to demonstrate that he was, for all practical purposes, God.

After being returned to my cell, I started to read a book. About 30 minutes later, the PCF Commander, CWO4 James Averhart, came to my cell. He asked me what had happened during my recreation call. As I tried to explain to him what had occurred, CWO4 Averhart stopped me and said “I am the commander” and that “no one could tell him what to do.” He also said that he was, for all practical purposes, “God.” I responded by saying “you still have to follow Brig procedures.” I also said “everyone has a boss that they have to answer to.” As soon as I said this, CWO4 Averhart ordered that I be placed in Suicide Risk Status.

Following Averhart’s order that Manning be labeled a suicide risk, he ordered guards to take his clothing.

He instructed the guards to enter my cell and take all my clothing. At first I tried to reason with CWO4 Averhart by telling him that I had been a model detainee and by asking him to just tell me what he wanted me to do and that I would do it. However, I gave up trying to reason with him once the guards entered my cell and ordered me to strip. Instead, I lowered my head and starting taking off my clothes.

Manning’s Article 138 complaint shows far more. It shows how the Brig Psychiatrist recommended at least 16 times between August 27 and January 21 that Manning be removed from Prevention of Injury watch. It shows that the day Manning was placed on suicide watch, there was a protest in support of him outside of Quantico. According to Manning, the guards harassed him, demanding he respond to every order with “Aye” rather than “Yes.” And except for that day (when he said “Yes” instead of “Aye” and then asked Averhart why that was happening to him), Manning was never deemed to present disciplinary problem.

Manning also describes the whole reason he is now being stripped every night: because he again asked why he is being treated this way.

On March 2, I was informed of your decision regarding my Article 138 complaint. Understandably frustrated by this decision after enduring over seven months of unduly harsh confinement conditions, I asked the Brig Operations Officer, MSG Papakie, what I needed to do in order to be downgraded from Maximum Custody and POI Status. MSG Papakie responded by telling me that there was nothing I could do to downgrade my detainee status and that the Brig simply considered me a risk of self-harm. Out of frustration, I responded that the POI restrictions were absurd and sarcastically told him if I really wanted to harm myself, that I could conceivably do so with the elastic waistband of my underwear or with my flip-flops.

The government torture canon makes it clear: their plan to break prisoners requires prisoners learn helplessness. A key part of that is–as Averhart himself explicitly described it–playing God.

It is clear the government’s program of abuse remains the same. This is the procedure they used on Abu Zubaydah. It is the procedure they used in Gitmo. They are now using it on an American citizen detained on American soil.

And surprisingly, they’re still describing their abuse in the very same term: God.