Archive for category: Torture

Meet "04-309." I don’t know his name–DOD redacted that from the reports on detainee deaths it released to ACLU some time ago. "04-309" is the number DOD assigned to the autopsy they did on him in Mosul on April 26, 2004, just two days before the Abu Ghraib story broke.

When 04-309 was captured by Navy Seals around April 2, 2004, he was around 27, a "well-developed, well-nourished" man, 6 foot and 190 pounds. He had no visible scars. He was, apparently, healthy.

04-309 did, however, show signs of minor injury: cuts and bruises around his head and belly and right shoulder and arm. These wounds may have come when he was arrested–his autopsy summary says "Q by NSWT [Navy Seals], struggled/interrogated" before it describes he, "died sleeping."

But 04-309’s Final Autopsy Report–completed on November 22, 2004, long after Abu Ghraib broke and the CIA’s Inspector General concluded the CIA’s interrogation program was cruel and inhumane (though not all that long after a criminal investigation of homicides committed in 2002 concluded, on October 8, 2004, that the deaths were partly caused by sleep deprivation and stress positions)–doesn’t conclude how he died. It does, however, describe these "circumstances of death:"

During his confinement, he was hooded, sleep deprived, and subjected to hot and cold environmental conditions, including the use of cold water on his body and hood.

Later in the document, the Opinion section explains,

Based on the available investigation and complete autopsy examination, no definitive cause of death for this approximately 27-year old male Iraqi civilian in US custody in Iraq could be determined. There is evidence of multiple minor injuries; however, there is no definitive evidence of any trauma significant enough to explain the death. The injuries include bilateral periorbital ecchymoses ("blackeyes"); abrasion and contusions of the face, torso, and extremities; contusion on the side of the neck’ and subgaleal hemorrhage of the scalp.

There is evidence of restraint, consisting of "flexicuffs" around the wrists with associated minor contusions, and asphyxia from various means cannot be completely excluded in a restrained individual. 

There are non-specific cardiac findings, including mild medial thickening of the sinus nodal artery and focal mild dysplasia of the penetrating branches of the atrioventricular nodal artery. However, there is no associated increased septal fibrosis, which can be a potential substrate for cardiac arrhythmia. There is no gross evidence of atherosclerosis of the coronary arteries. A cardiac arrhytmia related to ion channelopathies or coronary vasospasm cannot be excluded. 

The decedent was also subjected to cold and wet conditions, and hypothermia may have contributed to his death.

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As Spencer reported yesterday, the CIA has delayed the release of newly declassified sections of the IG Report until Wednesday, July 1.

Now, as someone who has long been harping on the importance of the IG Report, I also remain very skeptical that this next release will be the momentous event many are suggesting it will be. Given the CIA’s almost comical stinginess with declassification of late, I see no reason to believe that we’ll get much substantively new in next week’s declassification.

That said, the delay has actually made me temper that view, for a few reasons. First, look at the timeline.

June 17: The WaPo reports that the CIA is pushing the Obama Administration to keep descriptions of the torture used against detainee redacted. The same article reported that CIA "has not yet forwarded the document to the White House or the Justice Department for final review."

June 19: The CIA gets its first delay–to June 26, citing the need for an interagency review.

June 26: The CIA gets its second delay–to July 1, again citing the need for an interagency review.

As I said last week, it was clear we weren’t going to get the IG Report on the first deadline, June 19, because if the White House and DOJ hadn’t yet gotten the document by June 17, there was no way their review was going to be complete by June 19. But here we are a week later, and they’re still citing the interagency review process. 

They way I figure it, if the White House and DOJ had agreed with CIA’s declassification decisions, they ought to have been able to review the CIA’s declassifications in one week’s time. But that review has now apparently taken over a week, suggesting some difference of opinion on the declassifications. And assuming (given the precedent of the OLC memos) that Obama and Holder will be more inclined to declassification than the CIA, then I think the delay may suggest the White House and DOJ pushed CIA for greater disclosure. So from my perspective, the delay is actually a mildly promising sign.

And then there’s the timing. As a number of you have pointed out, releasing the report on July 1 sets up the classic pre-holiday document dump. What few journalists haven’t checked out for a long holiday weekend on July 2 yet won’t have much time to review the document before they do check out for a July 3 holiday. Read more →

Update 7/20: According to the CIA, those timelines are permissibly excluded "derivative" works.  See this post for an explanation.

It should not surprise you that I perk up whenever I see others discussing timelines. And so it should not surprise you, either, that I noted a little detail about the CIA so-called disclosure on its torture FOIAs.

The CIA is, apparently consistently, withholding timelines. In fact, it may be withholding different iterations the very same timelines.

As I pointed out several weeks ago, the CIA is being rather choosy about the stuff it includes in its Vaughn Index; whether by chance or plan, it has hidden any documents that might reveal discussions and approvals for torture that precede the OLC’s torture opinions in late July 2002. For example, they sampled more than the required one out of ten documents from among their sixteen undated documents relating to the torture tapes–they picked two. But both are uncontextualized descriptions of waterboarding (documents, frankly, it’s hard to believe they still claim are classified after the OLC memos). So they picked two almost identical documents, and avoided picking any of the six "Notes/Outlines" listed or, more interesting for me, any of the four  "Draft Preliminary Timelines," which are described to be 10, 29, 28, and 29 pages in length.

Boy would I like to get my hands on the CIA’s timeline of the torture program to match it up against my own!

Now, I have for some time speculated that most of these undated materials were working papers from the IG Report given the legal import of everything else, it’s hard to believe they’d be undated). And while that may or may not be the case, lo and behold, the IG Report happens to have a timeline!

In the Report’s table of contents, it lists an "Appendix B, Chronology of Significant Events." It’s one of the only two appendices the titles of which are not redacted in the TOC. Yet in the actual pages included in the FOIAed document, it not only doesn’t include the timeline, but it doesn’t even include the withholding page included for Appendices C through F, which at least provide a page count for the appendix in question. (Note, I believe there to be four or five more appendices the very existence of which the CIA is hiding, given the size of the redaction in the TOC.)

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