Chief of Iraq Torture Commandos: "The Americans knew about everything I did"

On March 6, the UK Guardian posted a very important story, with accompanying videos, examining in details and with witnesses the extraordinary efforts by US military and civilian personnel to assemble, train, and direct Shi'a commando brigades in Iraq. These police brigades and paramilitary units unleashed a hellish reign of terror, with massive round-ups, torture, and death squad killings.

The Guardian reveals from photos, interviews, and documentary evidence the chief role of former US Special Operations Colonel James Steele, as well as General Petraeus and other US officials in organizing this counterinsurgency-cum-terror campaign.

Steele had been in charge of training Salvadoran army personnel linked to a campaign of extrajudicial killings, disappearances, and torture during the Salvadoran Civil War in the 1980s. Back in those days, Petraeus was an ambitious up-and-comer, reportedly all too willing to learn what Steele, who'd learned counter-terror techniques in Vietnam, had to teach him, even staying in Steele's house.

Steele came to Iraq as a supposed civilian adviser. He carried a lot of authority, however, according to the Guardian investigation. From whence did that authority derive? Was he on special assignment for Rumsfeld (Rummy apparently is the one who sent him to Iraq)? For the National Security Council and/or the Joint Chiefs of Staff? Was he working with the CIA or JSOC's shadowy Intelligence Support Activity (ISA)? Steele, who is described in the Guardian video as someone who is extremely cold, without feeling, is unlikely ever to reveal that himself.

The Guardian also describes how military authorities commanded US soldiers on the scene, witness to such atrocities, not to intervene when present at such crimes. The order was first issued as FRAGO (Fragmentary Order) 242. The film interviews one of these brave soldiers, a military medic, who describes what he saw when the torture commandos were unleashed in Samarra.

Others interviewed for the film include Adnan Thabit, the chief of the Iraqi Special Police Commandos from 2004-06. The Guardian has excerpted his interview for a short video highlighing Thabit explaining, "The Americans knew about everything I did."

The main article, "From El Salvador to Iraq: Washington's man behind brutal police squads," notes that the Guardian tried to contact Steele for a year to get his side of the matter. He did not respond, and that is not surprising. Spooks never talk about what they are doing, and he may wish to note that anything said could be produced in court someday, because he appears to be a major war criminal, the hatchet man for the murderous policies of Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld.

US Connivance in Torture and the Case of Bradley Manning

The Guardian piece fleshes out the case I presented in my own story from August 2011 at FDL's The Dissenter, The Forgotten History of David Petraeus, including using evidence I had linked to the Petraeus-Iraq torture scandal, such as the protests of the Oregon National Guard over the stand-down on torture.

The article relies on the release of Wikileaks Iraq War Logs, which documented US knowledge of torture and the orders to soldiers to ignore it. It also interviews Peter Maass, whose 2005 investigatory report in the New York Times first concentrated on the role of Steele. The Guardian appears to be the first to have highlighted the role of Colonel James Coffman, a Petraeus adviser to Thabit's torture thugs.

The role of Wikileaks here is of piquant significance, as Wikileaks' leader, Julian Assange remains huddled up in the Ecuadoran embassy in London, having claimed political asylum in the wake of persistent demands for his extradition to Sweden on what appear to be shaky sexual offense charges. The Swedish prosecutors have reportedly refused to come and interview Assange in London. The impact of this and other repressive and financial pressures on Wikileaks may have affected their operations in strange ways.

But in even more dire straits is Private Bradley Manning, who has admitted in military court to turning over documents to Wikileaks. Manning revealed his motivation: he was moved to act after he was forced to help cover-up corruption by the Iraq National Police, and participate in round-ups of men who he strongly suspected would be tortured. Indeed, as Kevin Kosztola pointed out in a March 5 article at The Dissenter, Manning had been powerfully affected by this incident in comments he purportedly made to Adrian Lamo in computer chat logs.

Manning was even more direct in his statement to the military court: he decided to leak information because the US military had turned a blind eye to corruption and torture.

As the Guardian article and documentary on Steele show, Manning was certainly correct to fear the consequences of helping turn prisoners over to Iraq authorities. Yet Manning is on trial with life imprisonment hanging over his head, while David Petraeus, James Steele, Donald Rumsfeld and others walk free, able to enjoy the good life of the freedom this country allows those who play by the rules and ignore crimes against humanity, if not engage in them.

Kosztola also reports that Wikileaks has decided to withhold (for now) the documents that would illuminate just what Manning was referring to in the incident with the INP. Apparently they think they are protecting Manning. Under such dire circumstances as Manning faces, I suppose such release should really be up to Manning and/or his attorneys.

US Denial Over Government Use of Torture

The US counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, including the organization of police commando torture squads and secret prisons, cost over millions, perhaps billions of dollars. The Guardian explains:

In June 2004 Petraeus arrived in Baghdad with the brief to train a new Iraqi police force with an emphasis on counterinsurgency. Steele and serving US colonel James Coffman introduced Petraeus to a small hardened group of police commandos.... [Gen. Thabit] developed a close relationship with the new advisers. "They became my friends. My advisers, James Steele and Colonel Coffman, were all from special forces, so I benefited from their experience... but the main person I used to contact was David Petraeus."

With Steele and Coffman as his point men, Petraeus began pouring money from a multimillion dollar fund into what would become the Special Police Commandos. According to the US Government Accounts Office, they received a share of an $8.2bn (£5.4bn) fund paid for by the US taxpayer. The exact amount they received is classified.

With Petraeus's almost unlimited access to money and weapons, and Steele's field expertise in counterinsurgency the stage was set for the commandos to emerge as a terrifying force. One more element would complete the picture. The US had barred members of the violent Shia militias like the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army from joining the security forces, but by the summer of 2004 they had lifted the ban.

The Guardian report should shake up US denial over torture and the role of top US officials, such as former CIA director Petraeus, Obama's choice for the position after Panetta left to be Secretary of Defense. But US news media have largely ignored the story (though the New York Times noted it, relegating the story to a brief blog commentary), even though a report by Philip Bump at The Atlantic Wire called the Guardian story and video "staggering... blockbuster." Yet Bump's March 6 article only has (to date) about 3,600 views.

In a healthy democracy, there would immediate calls for Congressional investigations and hearings. But instead we have silence, as the US state rushes to maintain its right to project organized violence and terror wherever it wishes. A similar cover-up over the Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture is now unfolding, as Marcy Wheeler reports.

The full 51-minute documentary can only for now be viewed at the Guardian site, and I have no way to embed it here. It is essential viewing for anyone who wishes to know the full history of the US invasion and policy in Iraq. Click on the video title here to watch the documentary: James Steele: America's mystery man in Iraq.

Cross-posted at FDL/The Dissenter

Serious Questions About Wikileaks’ Release of Purported Guantanamo SOP (Updated)

On October 25, 2012, Wikileaks began to release what they indicated would be “more than 100 classified or otherwise restricted files from the United States Department of Defense covering the rules and procedures for detainees in U.S. military custody.” They labeled the release “The Detainee Policies.”

One of the first documents released was of the purported 2002 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures (SOP). According to the accompanying press release, this was “the foundation document for Guantanamo Bay (‘Camp Delta’).” Julian Assange is quoted in the press release as saying, “This document is of significant historical importance…. how is it that WikiLeaks has now published three years of Guantanamo Bay operating procedures, but the rest of the world’s press combined has published none?”

Assange, who has been fighting extradition to Sweden, and currently resides under asylum protection at the Ecuadoran embassy in London, also challenged the press and the public to read and analyze the documents. “Publicize your findings,” he asked.

But over three months later, there has been essentially zero analysis. Even though the Wikileaks “Detainee Policies” release had extensive world-wide coverage in the press and blogosphere, outside of a few tweets, there’s been practically no follow-up investigation of these documents.

The non-coverage after the initial release is in itself astounding, but even more surprising is the fact that when examined some of the documents appear to be problematic and of doubtful provenance. (In addition, strangely, the documents do not allow cut and paste commands to accurately reproduce text, which is not typical of Wikileaks documents.)

Sadly – since a good deal of reporters, myself included, have come to rely on the accuracy of what Wikileaks has posted over the years – an examination of the Camp Delta 2002 SOP raises serious reasons as to whether it is a reliable document. At best it is a very corrupted draft of an authentic document. At worst, it is a sloppy forgery.

In addition, there are further questions about other documents released as part of “The Detainee Policies,” as well questions as to whether Wikileaks personnel understood the material they were releasing. In the past, Wikileaks has used the resources of major media like the New York Times, the UK Guardian, El Pais, etc., and independent authoritative analysts, like Andy Worthington, for outside analytic assistance.

Wikileaks has been under significant economic and legal pressure from the US government and its corporate and other governmental allies, and it is no secret that the organization operates under serious constraints as a result. According to the organization, “An extrajudicial blockade imposed by VISA, MasterCard, PayPal, Bank of America, and Western Union that is designed to destroy WikiLeaks has been in place since December 2010.”

Whatever Wikileaks has accomplished in other document releases and analysis, the failure to accurately report or vet the “Detainee Policies” documents, by either Wikileaks or the world press and blogging community, calls into dire question the accuracy of a good deal of what passes for reporting by media outlets and commentators.

The only expert I could find who had anything to say about the Camp Delta SOP document was Almerindo Ojeda, who posted a link to the purported “Standing [sic] Operating Procedures” at the website for the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas (CSHRA), along with his caveats on the document. Ojeda’s own independent analysis largely concurred with my own.

What Did Wikileaks Release?

We cannot know the source of the documents Wikileaks released. So any analysis of the documents must rely on a close textual perusal of the documents themselves. And thanks to Wikileaks, who released the 2003 and 2004 Camp Delta SOPs a few years ago, we can contrast and compare very similar documents.

The “2002” Camp Delta SOP does not look like other DoD documents of this type. It has no markings regarding its classification status, for instance. The formatting is often erratic, with whole paragraphs published with centered rather than justified or left aligned text. There is a good deal of missing, mispaginated, and misordered text. A number of pages begin with text that does not follow logically from the preceding page.

There’s no doubt we are not looking at the SOP itself, even if we were to grant it was a genuine document. The Wikileaks document is not presented in the discrete pages of an actual document, but as a long running text document, as if from a word processor, with headings within the text indicating what page number out of 48 supposed pages a given block of text represents.

In addition, the page headers do not appear at the top or bottom of actual pages, but are interspersed within the text. The text itself does not go beyond "Page 47 of 48". The Wikileaks description of the document itself at the home page for the "Detention Poliicies" states that the document has 33 pages.

What Wikileaks calls the "Main [2002] SOP for Camp Delta, Guantanamo” states on its first page that it is a revision dated November 11, 2002. The subsequent SOP for Camp Delta is dated March 23, 2003, approximately five and one-half months later. That SOP, according to its text, was "reorganized" from the previous SOP, so it could consolidate "all aspects of detention and security operations" so the SOP could be "more efficient for its intended users."

Indeed, the new Wikileaks release of the purported 2002 Camp Delta SOP refers to separate SOPs for relating to detainee matters in relation to the International Committee of the Red Cross, as well as one for the "Use of IRF". IRF refers to "Internal Reaction Force," which according to this latest Wikileaks release is a 24 hour force available for "possible emergency response situations." Over the years, the IRF teams have been implicated in brutal beatings of prisoners and violent cell extractions.

The Wikileaks press release for the Detention Policies states, "The ’Detainee Policies’ provide a more complete understanding of the instructions given to captors as well as the ’rights’ afforded to detainees." It also asks "lawyers, NGOs, human rights activists and the public to mine the ’Detainee Policies’" and "to research and compare the different generations of SOPs and FRAGOs to help us better understand the evolution in these policies and why they have occurred."

Unfortunately, at least in the case of the purported 2002 Camp Delta SOP, it is unclear just what this document represents. Was it a faulty reconstruction of the original document, a draft of the SOP, a forgery based on some knowledge of the material? We can't know.

Another problem with the initial analysis by Wikileaks concerns unfamiliarity with the larger world of relevant documents on interrogation. For instance, in their press release, Wikileaks touts one document as revealing “a formal policy of terrorising detainees during interrogations.” This 13-page interrogation policy document from 2005 describes interrogation policies "that apply to... all personnel in the Multi-National Force–Iraq (MNF–I). Wikileaks points out as examples of “exploitative techniques” the use of "'approved' 'interrogation approaches'" such as "Emotional Love Approach" and "Fear Up (Harsh)."

While it is interesting to see that these interrogation techniques were applicable to the MNF-I, they are not, as the press release implies, new or unique "interrogation approaches," but are drawn from the Army Field Manual (AFM) for Intelligence Interrogation in use at that time. That particular version of the AFM came out in 1992. The two "approaches" remain in the current AMF as well, which was significantly updated in September 2006.

While Wikileaks may be wrong about the significance of discovering the use of Fear Up and other problematic techniques, the organization is correct that these are abusive techniques. In fact, such techniques in use by the Department of Defense’s interrogation manual only got worse after it was updated, with the addition of techniques of sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation that were not allowed in the earlier AFM, nor indeed, in the MNF-I document Wikileaks released. They are, however, allowed by the current Obama administration.

Wikileaks Responds

Only days after making the analysis above, I wrote to Wikileaks spokesman, Kristinn Hrafnsson.

I told Hrafnsson the 2002 Camp Delta SOP was “a mish-mash, a cut-and-paste nightmare that makes little sense. It cannot be, in this form, the SOP Wikileaks claims it to be. Perhaps it was a part of a former draft, but it is so mixed up, I wonder about even that. Much of the document, perhaps as much as half, consists of out of order sequences of text, in addition to numerous instances of missing text. I have wondered whether someone saw the original SOP and tried, miserably, to reconstruct it. I've even wondered if it is a forgery. For instance, it has a section on "Familiarization" that has no parallel in any other US DoD SOP that I can find. DoD just does not speak of the matters in that section in that way. In addition, I note that this 2002 purported Camp Delta SOP document is the draft that apparently was used for the supposed [Iraq-based] Camp Bucca draft SOP in 2004.”

The draft Camp Bucca document is another hodge-podge with all the same typographical and text problems as the 2002 Camp Delta SOP, except possibly worse, as the document confuses the two very different detention environments. For instance, on page 13, under “Detainee Tracking,” which begins its item list with number four (where are 1-3?), the document advises that “an overnight stay at GTMO… must be updated in the Camp Bucca Detainee Database…”

Three pages later, the Camp Bucca SOP advises that in case the Camp Command Center is moved due to an emergency,  the “JDOG Commander and JTF-GTMO Commander will be notified….”

I asked Hrafnsson if “ Wikileaks vetted the 2002 SOP in any way, and whether it stands by the characterization of it in the press release as ‘the foundation document for Guantanamo Bay’ and as the actual 2002 Camp Delta SOP.”

I also noted that in the press release Wikileaks represented the documents as "classified or otherwise restricted", but told Hrafnsson that DODD 2310.1 on Enemy Prisoners of War has been available online for years, including in the format (but oddly, not the font) Wikileaks presented it. “So this one document, at least, is not classified or restricted,” I wrote to the Wikileaks spokesperson, “and I wonder if you can comment on that.”

Hrafnsson’s reply on October 28 was quite brief, only two sentences.

“The doc is marked ‘rev’ - under revision. We are certain this is an authentic document from the US Military,” the Wikileaks spokesman wrote.

Interestingly, the document’s date of “revision,” November 11, 2002, is the same date given for the first known release of the Standard Operating Procedures for Guantanamo’s Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT). Important on its own account, it is worth comparing the 2002 Camp Delta SOP with how a vetted, actual DOD SOP looks, an SOP released on the same day. (Note, the BSCT SOP uses the phrase “Standard Operating Procedures,” while the 2002 Camp Delta SOP uses “Standing Operating Procedure.” The swap of the word “Standard” for the very rarely used “Standing” is itself indicative of something strange going on, and the later previously published Camp Delta SOPs all use the term “Standard Operating Procedure.”)

[Update, 2/2613, 6pm PST - After I received Hrafnsson's reply, I wrote back the next day:

Hi Kristinn,

Thanks for getting back to me. I understand that you are certain of the authenticity of the document as from the U.S. military. But does Wikileaks still stand by the characterization of this document as the actual, “foundational” Camp Delta SOP, i.e,, not a draft or something else?

In addition, you did not respond to the second question, where I asked whether Wikileaks still stood by its characterization of the release of DODD 2310.1 on Enemy Prisoners of War as either a previously “classified” or “restricted” document. Is that still your position?

Thanks, Jeff

Kristinn never bothered to reply, or chose not to, for reasons of his own.]

DoD Responds

On Monday, February 21, after about two weeks of waiting, Jose Ruiz, a spokesperson for US Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), Guantanamo's parent military command, answered my query for DoD feedback regarding the authenticity of the Wikileaks 2002 Camp Delta document.

"We do not comment on documents published by Wikileaks,” Ruiz wrote in an email.

“In addressing your request, we attempted to verify whether or not a 2002 Camp Delta SOPs ever existed, and if so, whether portions of the standard operating procedures (SOPs) were releasable.

“We can confirm that SOPs existed for every facility utilized by JTF-GTMO to house detainees. All such prior and present SOPs were developed and implemented to ensure task force detention operations are conducted in a safe, humane, legal and transparent manner.  For security reasons, we do not discuss specific details related to detention operation procedures or release documents containing specific details related to those procedures."

I take this to mean there was an SOP earlier than the 2003 SOP currently in the public domain, but due to DoD’s vagueness, that’s still only an educated guess.

SOUTHCOM may not comment on Wikileaks documents now, but that wasn’t always the case. It is instructive to compare Ruiz’s comments to what was said about earlier Wikileaks releases.

Back in November 2007, Wikileaks had posted the 2003 Camp Delta SOP, the first of their Guantanamo SOP releases. At that time, according to an article in the Miami Herald, “military spokesmen… confirmed the March 2003 policy manual was authentic, [but] they cited security needs at the remote Navy base in Cuba in declining to confirm specifics.”

CSHRA Analysis

The website for The Guantánamo Testimonials Project at the Center for the Study of Human Rights in America at UC Davis, which has published numerous documents and testimonies involved in the Guantanamo torture scandal, indicated that as a result of the irregularities in the 2002 SOP, it would “suspend judgement as to the reliability of this document as a source of testimony.”

The website states:

On October 25, 2012, Wikileaks released a Camp Delta Standing [sic] Operating Procedures for 2002 (click here). The document released differed sharply, however, from the earlier standard operating procedures it released. Both in form and in content. First, the released document has egregious spelling, grammar, and formatting errors. The former can be found even in titles (cf. "Famaliarazation" instead of "Familiarization"). Second, the document seems to have material simply deleted (as opposed to redacted) from it. To give an example, Page 13 of 48 introduced a section "b" for which no section "a" was previously introduced. Mentioned in this section "b" are a number of steps which start at "4" and go through "9". But no mention can be found of any prior steps 1, 2, 3. Along the same lines, page 13 of 48 concludes with a "Section 18. MILITARY POLICE BLOTTER". But no section prior to 18 can be found in the document— let alone seventeen such sections. Page 14 of 18 then continues with step 10 as if the aforementioned Section 18 was never mentioned.

As to content, the document has only 33 pages—which is an order of magnitude smaller than the previously released standard operating procedures for Camp Delta. And the omissions from the document are puzzling. There is almost no mention, for example, of forced cell extractions and how to carry them out (as we find in other SOPs). There are passing references to IRFs (§3009) and how to shackle prisoners in them (§4005.6.c), but nothing about how to approach the cells. Or why. Interestingly, it mentions at §3009 the existence of an IRF-specific SOP. Along similar lines, there is no mention of the initial period of solitary confinement "to prolong the stress of capture" (as we find in other SOPs). Or of the linguistic policies that other SOPs lay down carefully (the use of "self harm gesture" instead of "suicide", for example. Or of "voluntary total fasting" instead of "hunger strike"). There is also no mention of terrorism or the war on terror as a justification for the base.

In the Wikileaks press release accompanying the Detainee Policies documents, Assange wrote, “Guantanamo Bay has become the symbol for systematised human rights abuse in the West with good reason.” And indeed it has.

I cannot fault the intentions behind the motivations of Assange and his co-thinkers to expose the massive human rights and civil liberties abuses of the United States government. This article is not meant as a critique of Wikileaks in general, or of other releases put out by that organization, or even of the Detainee Policies release as a whole, which I have not analyzed fully in depth. It may be that there are other significant problems, or even useful findings in these documents that have not been discovered yet.

Every organization makes errors from time to time, and media organizations routinely have to issue corrections for such errors. At times, such errors have been colossal, or misinformation in mainstream media publications has testified to a close relationship with the government itself.

Something strange happened with the release of the Detainee Policies. The purported 2002 Camp Delta SOP is only the most egregious example. The strangeness is not only with Wikileaks, but even more with a press and blogging world that is too often incurious, aloof, willing to believe what is written down and unwilling to dig hard to find out what is really going on.

Cross-posted at Firedoglake/MyFDL

New Document Details Arguments About Torture at a JSOC Prison

Journalist Michael Otterman, author of the excellent book, American Torture: From the Cold War to Abu Ghraib and Beyond, was kind enough to forward to me some months ago a document he obtained via the Freedom of Information Act. The document consists of the after-action reports made by Colonel Steven Kleinman and Terrence Russell, two of the three team members sent by the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) to a top-secret special operations facility in Iraq in September 2003.

The reports, written shortly after both JPRA officials finished their assignment, present two starkly different accounts of what took place that late summer in the depths of a JSOC torture chamber. Even more remarkable, Col. Kleinman, who famously intervened to stop torture interrogations at the facility, had his own report submitted to Russell for comment. Indeed, Kleinman's report as released contains interpolations by Russell, such that the documents become a kind of ersatz debate over torture by the JPRA team members, and at a distance, some of the Task Force members.

This extraordinary document is being posted here in full for the first time. Click here to download.

"Cleared Hot"

Kleinman told the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), which in 2008 was investigating detainee abuse in the military (large PDF), that he thought as Team Leader (and Intelligence Director at JPRA's Personnel Recovery Academy) he was being sent to the Special Mission Unit Task Force interrogation facility to identify problems with their interrogation program.

Much to his surprise, he and his JPRA team were being asked to provide training in the kind of techniques originally used only for demonstration and "classroom" experience purposes in the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape, or SERE program. (JPRA has organizational supervisory control over SERE, though the constituent arms of the military services retain some independence in how they run their programs.)

But not far into his mission, JPRA's Commander, Colonel Randy Moulton, told Kleinman and his team they were "'cleared hot' to employ the full range of JPRA methods to include specifically the following: Walling - Sleep Deprivation - Isolation - Physical Pressures (to include stress positions, facial and stomach slaps, and finger pokes to chest) - Space/Time Disorientation - White Noise".

The story of the JPRA team visit and how it went bad, how Kleinman intervened when he saw a kneeling prisoner being repeatedly slapped, how he refused to write up a torture interrogation protocol for use at the TF facility -- widely believed to be Task Force 20 (as reported by Jane Mayer in her book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals) -- has been told at this point a number of times.

But never has the degree of acrimony and conflict that went on between Kleinman and his other JPRA team members, and the back and forth with superiors and TF personnel been so carefully detailed.

Russell, who was a civilian manager for JPRA's Research and Development division, was in particular open about why the team had been sent, and who they were helping. Kleinman, on the other hand, explained in his report at the outset that a nondisclosure agreement put "significant limitations on the details of our actions that can be reported herein."

Russell was not so reticent. He's quite clear the purpose of the TDY (temporary assignment) was "To provide support to on-going interrogation efforts being conducted by JSOC/TF-20 elements at their Battlefield Interrogation Facility (BIF).... At the request of JSOC, a JPRA support team was formed to advice [sic] and assist in on-going interrogations against hostile elements operating against Coalition Forces in Iraq. The mission of the TF-20 interrogation element, J2-X, was to exploit captured enemy personnel and extract timely, actionable intelligence to support operations that would lead to the capture of 'Black List' and other high-value and terrorist personnel."

According to Russell, "TF-20's deputy commander and JPRA/CC [that is, Commander, who was Col. Randy Moulton] approved the support team to become fully engaged in interrogation operations and demonstrate our exploitation tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP) to the J2-X staff."

"A lack of clear guidance"

Whatever the understanding of the team when it arrived, from the very beginning there was a debate over the "effectiveness" of the techniques being discussed. Kleinman noted "a lack of clear guidance on the legal status of the detainees and the absence of definitive directions pertaining to the treatment of those detainees."

According to the 2008 SASC report, TF-20 was operating under the same interrogation SOP that a similar special forces task force had used in Afghanistan. But this was also a time when there was a lot of turmoil with the Department of Defense over exactly what interrogation techniques were "legal." Indeed, only days before Kleinman and his team arrived at the BIF, Major General Geoffrey Miller had come to Iraq to assess detention and interrogation operations five months after the invasion of Iraq by U.S. forces. He counseled the military in Iraq to "get tougher with detainees."

The 2002 Special Forces TF interrogation SOP for Afghanistan is apparently still classified, but we know from other sources that it included use of sensory overload ("loud music"), sleep deprivation, 20-hour interrogations, stress positions, "controlled fear," and use of dogs, among other torture techniques.

Once at the BIF, Kleinman saw "clear violations" of the Geneva Conventions and "acted to terminate the activity," according to his own after-action report. It's amazing to then have the opportunity to see what the other senior JPRA-SERE official at the site had to say.

Russell commented on this portion of Kleinman's report: "I think the clear violation of the TF policy was of a minor nature -- that being a 10-minute extension of the kneeling policy. The use of insult slaps was, in the opinion of [one or two words redacted], serious enough to stop the interrogation -- an action I did not then or now feel warranted his [Kleinman's] direct intervention.... This direct intervention by JPRA staff, vs. having their own chain of command step in, resulted in irrevocable damage of our relationship with [TF] staff."

While Russell was given an opportunity to counter Kleinman's narrative, Kleinman received no such reciprocal courtesy. He told me in a voicemail message in January 2012 he had written his report assuming it was "eyes only for the commander."

He continued: "And oddly enough, I never saw Terry’s [i.e., Terrence Russell's report] until months and months later, I think when the investigation started. And what I didn’t know was Terry was given immediate access to mine and was able to try to respond point for point without me being able to respond to his responses. Also my copy, when I went to look for it on the official email, had disappeared for quite a while. And so anyway, there was a lot of weird things going on at the time, as you can imagine."

The "Effectiveness" Question

A full analysis of this remarkable document would take up too much space for a blog post, but it's important to point out one exchange between Kleinman and Russell in regards to differences over the "effectiveness" of the SERE and other interrogation and torture techniques, as the discussion strangely presages the debate about the efficacy of torture that has surrounded the controversial film Zero Dark Thirty.

Kleinman argued to his commander in his after-action report, "While JPRA simulates methods employed by nations not compliant with the GC [Geneva Convention] provisions, U.S. interrogators are bound by federal law to operate in strict accordance with those guidelines. [2 lines redacted] Intelligence interrogation involved, to a considerable degree, the recruitment of a detainee's willing cooperation through the skilled employment of psychological levers that do not include the presentation of threats either explicitly or implicitly."

Russell countered: "While some few of the tools employed, namely some physical pressures, are outside GC guidelines, [1-1/2 lines redacted] This is routinely done with little use of tactics prohibited by the GCs."

Kleinman then discussed his own experiences as an interrogator, concluding, "... the use of non-coercive methods have proven far more effective in obtaining reliable and actionable intelligence than coercive methods. Recent studies of interrogation in support of the global war on terrorism corroborate this finding; conversely, the use of coercive methods has consistently proven to be ineffective and counterproductive."

Russell took umbrage at this, and referencing studies on interrogation done at Guantanamo, made his case for the use of coercive techniques, unconsciously echoing the words of Bruce Jessen, made years before in notes for the construction of a SERE instruction class that he and James Mitchell (and possibly others) would reverse-engineer into the "enhanced interrogation program" of the Bush years.

"In regards to the recent study on effectiveness at GTMO," Russell wrote, "of which there is plenty of room to debate whether or not that have had [sic] much success, there are a number of major variables not here addressed. GTMO is a strategic interrogation/debriefing facility -- not a battlefield interrogation facility. In addition, a key component of the process of exploiting a source is to get them to a mental state of despair and recognition of the omnipotence of the interrogator. Once in that state, the exploiter can offer a way out -- namely cooperation via non-coercive methods. At GTMO they have the luxury of holding a person for 18-24 months in a facility cut off from family, country, and support systems, with seemingly no end in site [sic], that would cause most rationale [sic] persons to move into a state of despair. A battlefield/tactical interrogation facility does not have that time luxury -- the requirement to put a resistant detainee into a state of despair must and can be accelerated though the use of coercive exploitation applied IAW [in accordance with] directives, well-considered SOPs and ROEs [Rules of Engagement]. Once there, non-coercive methods are employed to gain the reliable information sought."

Russell's statement is remarkable enough, but I asked Kleinman some time ago what "effectiveness" studies he and Russell were referring to. Kleinman told me that he was referring to many different kinds of studies going back to the Cold War years. He didn't believe Russell had any "study on effectiveness at GTMO" that he could actually refer to.

But after checking around, I discovered there appears to be such a study done by Major General Miller himself. In early 2003, Miller, who was then Commander Joint Task Force-Guantanamo, had submitted a document to then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's Working Group on interrogations, looking into what extended set of coercive methods would be allowable for use by DoD interrogators. Miller titled his four page paper, Effectiveness of the Use of Certain Category II Counter-resistance Strategies. It was published later as Enclosure 66 of the Schmidt-Furlow Report, "Investigation into Federal Bureau of Investigation Allegations of Detainee Abuse at Guantánamo Bay Detention Center."

According to the ACLU, the memo "is a response to the Director's request for info concerning the effectiveness of interrogation techniques approved by the Secretary of Defense. 'Included with this memo is a timeline of interrogation techniques used, info obtained as a result and justifications for their use', but this info is either redacted or not present. 'Numerous detainees demonstrated counter-resistance techniques. Consequently, [redacted] Commander, JTF-170 requested authorization to employ specific techniques in addition to those in the Field Manual. These techniques were approved by the Secretary of Defense.'"

I can't know for sure if this was Russell's GTMO "effectiveness" document or not, but it would seem like a prime candidate (unless Kleinman was right and Russell never knew of any actual study). Since the document is nearly entirely censored, we can't know for sure, nor we do know how such "effectiveness" was studied.

I was unable to find a way to reach Russell to obtain his comment.

Today, Kleinman is Director for Strategic Research for The Soufan Group, according to a webpage at the company's website.

High-Value Interrogation Group and Current Research on Interrogation "Effectiveness"

The current official DoD directive on interrogation specifically disallows the use of SERE-derived interrogation techniques. However, it does task the Director, Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC), with "assessment of the effectiveness of intelligence interrogations."

According to a March 2011 report by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (large PDF), the administration's High-Value Interrogation Group (HIG) is currently responsible for some of this research. The report states, "The HIG also has responsibilities concerning improving the training of interrogators and sponsoring research on interrogation." Presumably, that includes research on the "effectiveness" of interrogation methods.

How that research is conducted, and the ethics that inform such a project, are kept secret. Recently, however, one HIG researcher, psychologist Susan Brandon, who also works for DCHC, was known to be involved in research on the case of the supposed (and confessed) Iranian-American would-be assassin, Mansour Arbabsiar.

The HIG's tasking for interrogation research was echoed in remarks to the press by then Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair in February 2010, according to a story by AFP.

An elite US interrogation unit will conduct "scientific research" to find better ways of questioning top suspected terrorists, US intelligence director Dennis Blair said Wednesday.

"It is going to do scientific research on that long-neglected area," Blair told the House Intelligence Committee, without elaborating on the nature of the techniques being tested.

A spokesman for Blair, Ross Feinstein, also declined to detail "specific research projects" but stressed that any such projects would follow US law, which forbids torture, and abide by internal review safeguards.

JSOC Black Site Revealed, Disappearing of Iraqi Prisoners by US/Coalition Forces

Ian Cobain at the UK Guardian has a very important story posted that should get the attention of U.S. citizens. A somewhat complicated article, "RAF helicopter death revelation leads to secret Iraq detention camp" tells the tale of how an investigation into the death of an Iraqi prisoner led to a much larger tale of how coalition forces in the Iraq war hid prisoners from the International Red Cross, killed at least some of them, then hid that fact.

The prisoner were taken to a hitherto unknown base run by Joint Special Operations Forces Task Force 20 (later known better as Task Force 121, when they moved their operations, including heinous torture, to Camp Nama by the Baghdad airport). The black site, codenamed H1, was at an airfield next to a pumping site in the desert wasteland of the western Iraq desert.

The prisoners were captured by forces from a number of countries, but the "official" captures were turned over to the US forces, to protect the other nations' militaries, who knew they were vulnerable to war crimes charges for what they were doing.

The tale of how the reporters sniffed out this story is incredible in and of itself, taking many twists and turns, including the discovery that the identity of the murdered prisoner was for a very long time misidentified by UK personnel. The entire matter is now supposedly under military investigation.

Snippets from the Guardian article:

The holding facility at H1 was not inspected by the Red Cross. Moreover, its existence was not disclosed to Lieutenant Colonel Mercer, the UK's most senior army lawyer in Iraq at the time. Mercer says he was "extremely surprised" to learn of its existence.

He said: "This matter potentially raises very serious questions. Strenuous efforts were made at all times to ensure that all prisoners were accorded the full protection of the Geneva conventions and vigorous objections would have been raised if there was the slightest possibility of a breach of the conventions. It appears from the information disclosed that some prisoner operations were being conducted, deliberately or otherwise, outside of the chain of command."

The holding facility appears effectively to have been a secret prison – a so-called black site. It is entirely possible, according to international law experts, that taking prisoners to H1 could amount to "unlawful deportation or transfer or unlawful confinement", and that the prisoners were subjected to "enforced disappearances", both of which are war crimes under the Rome statute of the international criminal court.

One former RAF Regiment trooper who was based at H1 for several months has described being involved in a number of similar missions in which prisoners were collected from coalition special forces. This always happened "under total darkness", he says. On arrival at H1, the prisoners were handed on to people whom he describes as "other authorities".

Could this explain why the police investigation into the alleged killing of Tariq Sabri ended with some of the most basic facts – such as his name and the the cause of his death – remaining unknown?

According one well-placed source with knowledge of Operation Raker, the RAF police investigation into the death, there were some at the MoD who were concerned about the possible consequences of a more thorough inquiry: people who were filled with dread at the thought that it could lead to accusations that British forces and others had been involved in crimes against humanity.

Iraqi Torture Scandal Touches Highest Levels of NATO

Originally posted at Truthout

A scandal unfolding in Denmark over the transfer of Iraqi prisoners by Danish forces to Iraq authorities, even as they knew they would be tortured, threatens to implicate the current Secretary General of NATO Anders Fogh Rasmussen, formerly prime minister of Denmark from 2001-2009.

The defense ministry in the government of former Prime Minister Rasmussen is charged with withholding its knowledge of Iraqi torture from legislators when a copy of a 2004 inspection at Al Makil prison in Basra was sent to Parliament.

According to an article last month in the Danish paper Politiken, portions of the report describing prisoner abuse were "blacked out," with the reason given that such "information could harm Danish-Iraq cooperation."

Yet, three months before the prison inspection, in May 2004, during a debate in the Danish Parliament concerning Iraqi prisoners, according to the paper Dagbladet Information (English translation here), then-Prime Minister Rasmussen said the government would "disclose information about torture, if the government becomes aware that it occurs." But evidently, this did not occur.

According to The Copenhagen Post, a Danish English-language daily, the July 2004 investigation by Danish Army legal adviser Maj. Kurt Borgkvist revealed that "prisoners in Iraqi prisons had been burned with cigarettes, had their molars crushed and been beaten around their genitals. Some were even missing fingers, Borgkvist reported." The resulting report included photographic evidence, which has been described as "Abu Ghraib-lignende" ("Abu Ghraib-like") by the previous Danish defense minister.

Rasmussen, leader of Denmark's Liberal Party, resigned as prime minister in April 2009 in order to accept a position as NATO's secretary general. Most recently, he was an outspoken supporter of NATO's military support to the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya. Last November, the Liberal Party and its coalition partners lost power for the first time in almost a decade, losing to a coalition led by the Social Democrats. Rasmussen was also a key supporter of the US campaign to go to war in Iraq in 2003, ironically citing in a UN address Iraqi violations of international anti-torture treaties.

The scandal first arose in 2010 from documents released by WikiLeaks in the "Iraq War Logs." A November 2010 article at Ice News reported how a memo released by WikiLeaks described an inquiry by "a Danish Defence Ministry official" regarding "what happened at the American Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq after media reports of torture and abuse in 2003." Subsequently, "Danish soldiers continued to hand over prisoners to the facility, however, even after the torture was officially confirmed several months later."

"'That Denmark didn't intervene in time simply shows that someone must have stopped the criticism at the political level', said Social Democratic Defense Spokesman John Dyrby Paulsen. 'That is also why we want an inquiry into all of this', he added."

An October 2010 story in Dagbladet Information noted that "coalition forces share military reports" and "the Danish military has also had access to accounts on Iraqi police methods," indicating that all the coalition forces, Denmark included, "had knowledge of the situation which was consistent with several highly critical warnings from organizations such as The International Red Cross and Human Rights Watch."

A government commission into Denmark's involvement in the Iraq war is expected later this year. The last Danish forces left Iraq last November.

The WikiLeaks logs also revealed that Danish forces in Iraq had been involved in turning greater numbers of prisoners over to the Iraqis than the Danish government had previously revealed.

According to a report at WikiLeaks Press, former Danish Defense Minister Søren Gade previously told the Danish Parliament that Danish troops had only 21 prisoners. But according to the leaked "War Logs," "the actual number of prisoners taken in the period at a minimum of 95. Of these, 62 were handed over to Iraqi authorities, who were well known to be carrying out torture in Iraqi prisons." In reply, the Defense Ministry "argued that the reason for the great disparity between the reported number of prisoners was due to the fact that many of the prisoners had been captured by British troops and that the Danish troops therefore could not be held accountable."

But recent revelations have seen the number of prisoners actually handed over has grown from a later admitted 200 to a reported 500 or more. The higher number surfaced in a memorandum from Defense Chief Gen. Knud Bartels to the new Defense Minister Nick Hækkerup. (Bartels, himself, has recently assumed the position of NATO's Military Committee chairman.)

In a January 2 article, The Copenhagen Post reported that Denmark's former Defense Minister Søren Gade would be called as a witness in an upcoming trial, stemming from a lawsuit by six Iraqis who were arrested in winter 2004 by Danish forces supporting the US-led coalition forces in Iraq. The prisoners were turned over to Iraqi forces and subsequently tortured.

As the Post notes, "According to international law, soldiers may not deliver prisoners of war to another authority they suspect of mistreating or torturing prisoners." This international prohibition is written into the UN Convention Against Torture, which states that no signatory to the treaty can return or refoule any person to a state authority "where there are substantial grounds for believing that he would be in danger of being subjected to torture."

In a January 5 editorial, the Post insisted that "ordering soldiers to turn a blind eye to the likely mistreatment of detainees amounts to a cold-blooded disregard for the well-being of others." The paper called for the Danish military to cooperate with any investigations, "even if that means allowing top brass, former ministers or senior statesmen to be felled in the process."

A further dimension to the scandal concerns not only the number of prisoners involved, but also the ways the Danes tried to hide their culpability.

The Bartels letter to Hækkerup also described, according to Politiken, how "'in a few cases' Iraqi prisoners were illegally handed over to Iraqi authorities and that in many cases Danish troops avoided defence directives by letting British troops detain Iraqis during joint missions in order to avoid responsibility."

The controversy over handing over prisoners to be tortured by Iraqi forces has not been limited to Denmark. Indeed, after the release of the WikiLeaks "Iraq War Logs," numerous reports of such transfers of prisoners, despite knowledge of torture practices, were published in the British and US press.

According to the publication of one of the "Iraq War Logs" by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, in at least one case, a US military interrogator threatened a prisoner with being turned over to the notorious Iraqi Wolf Brigade, "where he would be subject to all the pain and agony that the wolf battalion is known to exact upon its detainees."

Similar charges of coalition forces turning prisoners over for torture in Afghanistan have also raised controversy. Last September, NATO announced it was suspending many such transfers after years of reports of torture by Afghan security and military personnel.

The Obama administration has pointedly refused to initiate any investigations into US torture, while the British government has announced formation of a government commission to look into the torture charges. The British commission, which has yet to begin its work, has been boycotted by human rights groups, who describe the commission as "toothless" and lacking "meaningful, independent" review.

NATO headquarters did not return a request for comment as of press time. In addition, attempts to verify details of "Iraq War Logs" information were stymied by what appears to be an Internet-wide suppression of the formerly available documents.

Note: This posting has been updated to correct the date of Anders Fogh Rasmussen's resignation and the titles of two Danish news publications.

More Evidence of Water Torture "Depravity" in Rumsfeld's Military

Reposted from Truthout, written by Jeffrey Kaye

There have been a number of cases of detainees held by the Department of Defense (DoD) who have been subjected to water torture, including some that come very close to waterboarding, according to an investigation by Truthout. The prisoners have been held in a number of settings, from Afghanistan and Iraq to Guantanamo Bay.

In a number of settings, DoD spokespeople in the past  - most notably former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld - have denied the use of waterboarding by DoD personnel. But as examples of DoD water torture have multiplied, it appears government denials about "waterboarding" were overly legalistic, and that behind them, DoD personnel were hiding torture involving similar methods of choking, suffocation or near-drowning by water.

Reports of water-related torture by the military include having water forced into the nose or mouth by a hose, repeated dunking in water, pouring water over the head in such a way that it is difficult to breathe or over a piece of cloth or hood, dousing with high-pressure hoses, dousing or partial drowning in combination with the application of a chemical agent, and in a few instances, actually being thrown into a large body of water, such as a river.

An article in Truthout earlier this month documented a half-dozen cases of DoD prisoners subjected to waterboarding-style torture. The article also detailed discussions among high-ranking military and intelligence officials around the use of waterboarding, and the fact that interrupted or simulated drowning at a military site in Kandahar, called "water treatment" in this instance, was revealed at a Congressional hearing in May 2008.

Human rights and civil liberties groups have expressed concern over news of DoD water torture and have asked for further investigation.

Asked to respond on behalf of the Senate Armed Services Committee on the reports of such water torture, spokesperson Kathleen Long said the committee had "no comment."

One web site, Lawfare, co-founded by former Department of Justice official Jack Goldsmith, who was involved in internal decisions surrounding torture inside the Bush administration, seemed confused by the Truthout report, complaining that "reports of waterboarding-like tortures at Guantanamo" lacked "any examples of the military's using waterboarding, but refers to the repeated use of water in interrogations instead."

Truthout continues to investigate further instances of DoD waterboarding-style torture at US military sites in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo.

"Waterboarding-style" torture refers to the use of water to provoke choking or suffocation by water, and, in some cases, the triggering of the sensation of drowning, if not actual drowning itself, but without actually following the CIA's description of the waterboard procedure. It is has also been called "water treatment," "water torture" and "drown-proofing."

"The Interrogators Asked Me to Confess to Being a Part of 9/11"

In an affidavit filed on April 21, 2009, in the US District Court for the District of Columbia, Muhammad al-Ansi, a Yemeni accused of being a bodyguard for Osama bin Laden, described his torture in a tent at Kandahar Air Base in Afghanistan in the early weeks of 2001. According to al-Ansi, it began after a female interrogator became angry he would not "confess."

Four American soldiers came and took me into another room. It was not a tent. They put me on a slab (the size and shape of a bed) made of bricks. I was made to lay on my stomach with my head hanging over the edge. They brought in a big water container and placed it under my head. They would [handwritten: forced [sic]] my head and shoulders [handwritten: under] into the water until I almost drowned and lift my head out at the last minute. They did this over and over. During this time, the interrogators asked me to confess to being a part of 9/11, confess I am part of al Qaeda, confess that I swore allegiance to Osama bin Laden, confess I have explosive weapons training, and confess to knowing several names that I had never heard of. This continued for one to two hours. I said nothing other than: "Have mercy on me."

In another instance of torture in Afghanistan, in June 2008, Tom Lasseter reported for McClatchy that Ghalib Hassan, "a district chief in Nangarhar province for the Afghan Interior Ministry," was detained "in a basement at an airstrip in Jalalabad during March 2003" by Special Forces troops.

According to Hassan, "At night they would strap me down on a cot, and put a bucket of water on the floor, in front of my head. And then they would tip the cot forward and dunk my head in the bucket.... They would leave my head underwater and then jerk it out by my hair. I sometimes lost consciousness."

Once again, the military personnel involved demanded that the prisoner confess, in this instance to supporting a former Taliban official. In fact, the Taliban had expelled Hassan in 1996, and he had fought with US-backed forces at Tora Bora against the Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Another case from Afghanistan concerned Saudi national Ahmed al-Darbi. Arrested by authorities in Azerbaijan in 2002 and later turned over to the Americans, he is the brother-in-law of 9/11 hijacker Khalid al-Mihdhar. Al-Mihdhar is also famous for being one of two al-Qaeda suspects who US intelligence knew was attending a meeting with other suspected terrorists in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in January 2000. As it turned out, this meeting likely involved the planning of the 9/11 and USS Cole terrorist attacks.

In a recently aired video interview with filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski, Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism "czar" who resigned during the Bush administration, charged former CIA director George Tenet and top CIA officials Cofer Black and Richard Blee with suppressing information about al-Mihdhar's intent to enter the United States after the Malaysia meeting. The CIA deliberately had withheld cables to the FBI about al-Mihdhar entering the United States and failed to notify the State Department to put him and his traveling companion on the State Department watch list.

Al-Mihdhar's brother-in-law, al-Darbi, was renditioned from Azerbaijan to Afghanistan in 2002 and was later sent to Guantanamo, where he remains to this day. In a declaration dated July 1, 2009, al-Darbi cited a number of instances of abuse and torture at both the Bagram prison in Afghanistan and later at Guantanamo.

At Bagram, al-Darbi stated, at times, "a sand bag or hood was placed over my head and tightened around my neck, and then they would grab my head and shake it violently while swearing at me and they would also pour water over my head while my head was covered." The covering over the head while water is poured sounds very much like waterboarding. Al-Darbi also indicated that a powder, perhaps pepper spray, was applied to him and then water sprayed on him, so that the "water absorbed the powder and it burned my skin and made my nose run."

More Water Torture at Guantanamo

In an August 2 Truthout article, six cases of water torture were described at the Cuban naval base prison. Two of these cases, including "near asphyxiation from water," were described in an article published in an online medical journal earlier this year, but the identities of the detainees were kept anonymous.

Further investigation has found three more reports of such torture at Guantanamo and two cases of unique water torture, something between water dousing and waterboarding-style interrupted drowning.

One of the cases, of British citizen Tarek Dergoul, who was released from Guantanamo in 2004, involved treatment very similar to that reported by Omar Deghayes and Djamel Ameziane in the earlier Truthout article. According to an interview given to UK Guardian reporter David Rose, when Dergoul refused to have his cell searched for a third time on one day, an Extreme Reaction Force (ERF) squad was called.

"They pepper-sprayed me in the face and I started vomiting," Dergoul reported, "in all I must have brought up five cupfuls. They pinned me down and attacked me, poking their fingers in my eyes, and forced my head into the toilet pan and flushed." They continued to beat him and finally shaved off his hair, beard and eyebrows.

In another interview, Guantanamo detainee Salim Mahmoud Adem, a Sudanese national released in 2007, ?told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now that he had witnessed another prisoner having his head shoved repeatedly into a toilet. Interestingly, the story came up after Goodman asked about waterboarding.

AG: Salim, did – Salim, did you witness anyone waterboarded?

SMA: I did not see waterboarding, but my neighbor, they insulted the Qu'ran, so we refused to listen to the guards. So they would come with the riot police and enter into the cells, one by one. So they went into the cell of a Yemeni brother, whose name is Othman [phonetic]. After they tied him, his hands to his back, they put his head to the toilet and turned on the flush many times. And all of us could see it. This was a horrible sight.

The torture of Sami al-Haj, an Al Jazeera cameraman held at Guantanamo for seven years and finally released in 2008, presents a unique instance of torture involving forced application of water. Al-Haj was a hunger striker who, along with a number of other hunger strikers, was put on a forced feeding schedule. Civil rights attorney Candace Gorman, who has also represented some of the Guantanamo detainees, described the procedure in a May 2007 article for In These Times.

According to Gorman, al-Haj described his experience of forced feeding to his attorney. Al-Haj said he was strapped into a chair and had a tube painfully inserted through his nose twice each day. The attendants would blow air into the tube in order to ascertain its placement. Al-Haj would suffer in silence, "until tears stream down his cheeks."

But sometimes things went even worse:

Three times they have inserted the tube the wrong way, so it went into his lungs. When they think that has happened they check by putting water into the tube, which makes him choke. Al-Haj says that never once have the hospital personnel apologized when the tube entered his lung.

Extreme "Water Dousing"

In a few reports, detainees have described a form of "water dousing" that went far beyond the description of the procedure given by the CIA. According to the 2004 CIA Inspector General (IG) report on "counterterrorism detention and interrogation activities," which looked at the implementation of the so-called "enhanced interrogation" techniques of the Bush administration, "water dousing" involved "laying a detainee down on a plastic sheet and pouring water over him for 10 to 15 minutes." The room was to be maintained at room temperature.

In a 2008 Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) report, "Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by US Personnel and its Impact," PHR quoted testimony by a detainee, Haydar (not his real name), who recalled having been sprayed with pepper spray and then hosed with high-pressure water. "This one female soldier subjected me to pepper gas and then sprayed me with water with extreme force - and I was writhing on the ground in pain," Haydar said.

Another Guantanamo detainee, British citizen Jamal al-Harith, noted in a 2004 statement to the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly that he knew of "three or four occasions guards using an industrial strength hose to shoot strong jets of water at detainees. This was done to me on one occasion. A guard walked along the gangway by the cages sending the hose into each alternate cage. When it happened to me I was hosed down continuously for about one minute. The pressure of the water was so strong it forced me to the back of the cage. It soaked the cage including my bedding and my Koran."

Such cases of "water dousing" by Guantanamo guards, including the use of high-pressure hoses, went far beyond what was even contemplated by such a technique even under CIA torture procedures.

Drownings in Iraq

A review of news reports from Iraq reveal two separate instances of actual drowning of Iraqi detainees by US and British forces. In one case, soldiers were court-martialed and received light sentences. In the other case, the men were acquitted.

In January 2005, Army Sgt. First Class Tracy Perkins was convicted for ordering men under his command one year earlier to throw Iraqi detainees into the Tigris River. One of the Iraqis, 19-year-old Zaidoun Hassoun, drowned. Perkins was sentenced to six months in military prison and his rank was reduced to staff sergeant.

Perkins claimed he was ordered to throw the men in the river by his platoon leader, Army First Lt. Jack Saville. According to an account by the UK Guardian, Saville "pleaded guilty to assault and dereliction of duty," and was sentenced to 45 days in military prison and ordered to pay a $12,000 fine. The light sentence was reportedly because "Lt. Saville agreed to testify against his captain, who had given him a hit list of five Iraqis who were to be executed on the spot if they were captured in a raid."

But there was more. According to a July 2004 Associated Press article, the actions by Saville, Perkins, and two other soldiers, Sgt. Reggie Martinez and Spec. Terry Bowman, were initially covered up by their commanding officers. At an Article 32 hearing, and under grants of immunity, Capt. Matthew Cunningham, Maj. Robert Gwinner and battalion commander Lt. Col. Nathan Sassaman said they told Saville and his men to "to clam up because they feared higher-ups in the chain of command would use the incident against them."

In another case, British soldiers, operating as part of the US-led alliance that invaded Iraq, arrested and beat an Iraqi teenager, who was then ordered to swim across the Shatt al-Basra canal. According to an account in the Guardian, 17-year-old (some reports say 15-year-old) Ahmed Jabbar Kareem was too weakened by his injuries and drowned. All four soldiers involved were acquitted of manslaughter in the case. One of the soldiers, Irish guardsman Joseph McCleary, told the press, "We were told to put the looters in the canal. I was the lowest rank, and we were always told we weren't paid to think. We just followed orders."

The acquittal of the British soldiers and the light sentences for US soldiers involved in the drowning of captives represent an attitude towards prisoners in general - including the use of water torture and drowning - that carried minimal consequences in the Iraq war theater.

Indeed, in a US Army Criminal Investigation Command (CID) investigatory report dated May 27, 2004 (pg. 70), the special agent in charge reported that a team leader for 5th Special Forces group (Airborne), based in Al Asad, Iraq, gave "special instructions for the guarding and handling of EPWs" [enemy prisoners of war], including "maintaining a sandbag over their heads, playing loud music and pouring water over their heads."

The torture of the Iraqi EPWs is very similar to the description Ahmed al-Darbi gave of his treatment at Bagram.

Reactions to New Revelations

The examples of water torture described in this and the earlier Truthout article are certainly not the only occurrences of water torture. For instance, one further example exists of a Guantanamo detainee who suffered water being poured over his head while it was covered, but further details could not be given due to legal restrictions covering his case.

It is also assumed that some instances of such torture have not yet been revealed. The press and human rights groups have not interviewed most prisoners released from US custody. Furthermore, detainees released from Guantanamo must sign an agreement that twice notes they can be "immediately" re-imprisoned if the United States finds any condition of the agreement, which includes prohibitions against conspiracy or vague "preparation of" "combatant activities," violated. Fear of re-imprisonment and psychological traumatization from their experience have led many former detainees to maintain a silence about their experiences.

Not all observers or participants in DoD activities have indicated they witnessed or heard of water torture at DoD sites.

Morris Davis, who was chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo Bay from September 2005 until his resignation in October 2007, told Truthout that his office, "focused on about 75 of the detainees we were assessing for potential prosecution." He added he, "did not have the time or the manpower to examine the many others that were not likely candidates for prosecution."

Even so, Davis told Truthout, "I never saw any evidence that any detainee was waterboarded or subjected to any similar technique at Gitmo," though "others things [were] done to some of them that I believe constitute torture."

In addition, some guards, even if critical of abuses at Guantanamo, have said they did not witness waterboarding or water torture at the Cuban prison camp. In an interview with The Talking Dog blog in March 2009, former guard Terry Holdbrooks Jr. said, "In my time in Camp Delta, I didn't see or hear of any waterboarding."

But testimony and evidence offered in this investigation strongly suggest that water torture similar to waterboarding or of other extreme nature was inflicted on some prisoners under US military control, and also by allied forces.

Some sources have been adamant that waterboarding did in fact occur, for instance, at Guantanamo.

In an April 2007 statement to the Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, Guantanamo detainee attorney Brent Mickum said that a guard who had worked at the prison camp told him "prisoners at Guantanamo were routinely waterboarded." Mickum reiterated this point in an interview with the blog The Talking Dog later that year.

Mickum said the guard "confirmed that waterboarding, which he called 'drown-proofing' took place. This individual knew extensive details of the camp layout and the names of military personnel. Eventually, the full story will be released and people will be shocked at the extent of the depravity."

Mickum has also said he heard from a civilian contractor that he heard interrogators talking about waterboarding at Guantanamo in 2003.

In a telephone interview, Alexander Abdo, a staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union's (ACLU) National Security Project, responding to the accumulated evidence compiled on DoD water torture, told Truthout, "The suggestion that the use of water to torture is more widespread than previously thought is extremely troubling, and reaffirms the need for greater transparency and a broader investigation into the abuse committed under the Bush administration."

In an emailed statement, Vince Warren, executive director for Center for Constitutional Rights, whose attorneys have represented a number of Guantanamo detainees, said, "It's clear even from the accounts of men who were released from Guantánamo that many more people were subjected to different forms of water torture or simulated drowning than the three victims of waterboarding the government has admitted to. Our attorneys can't talk about what happened to our all of clients because they are under a protective order, but public documents show the widespread extent of this barbarity. It's simply shameful."

This work by Truthout is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.

Guardian Publishes Secret UK Torture Instructions

Cross-posted from FDL/The Dissenter

In January 2002, the British government gave instructions to its intelligence agencies debriefing or interrogations prisoners captured in Afghanistan, many of whom were being abused or tortured by their US allies. The agencies asked for legal guidance, and the UK Guardian has now published what that guidance was, posting the original document online.

According to the Guardian:

The interrogation policy – details of which are believed to be too sensitive to be publicly released at the government inquiry into the UK's role in torture and rendition – instructed senior intelligence officers to weigh the importance of the information being sought against the amount of pain they expected a prisoner to suffer. It was operated by the British government for almost a decade....

One section states: "If the possibility exists that information will be or has been obtained through the mistreatment of detainees, the negative consequences may include any potential adverse effects on national security if the fact of the agency seeking or accepting information in those circumstances were to be publicly revealed.

A couple of quick points, as I won't have time to delve real far into this today.

1) The UK government's guidance essentially asks the intelligence agents and interrogators, who specifically are not allowed to use torture or cruel treatment themselves, to assess whether the intel gathered through the torture of their US allies would have any negative effects if exposed. If so, then they are to ask for permission from higher ups to proceed. Presumably, if they believe the means of extracting information won't ever be found out, they can proceed (though the document notes such intel can't then be used in court).

This also means that collaboration with torture occurred most likely at higher agency levels, or even, as the document suggests, at the Minister level.

The Forgotten History of David Petraeus

Originally posted at FDL/The Dissenter

In July, General David Petraeus was approved as CIA Director by both the Senate Intelligence Committee and then the full Senate, whose vote was an astounding 94-0, astounding because this is a man who was deeply implicated in war crimes, including torture.

While Petraeus's record on backing both torture and death/terror squads in Iraq had been looked at before, literally no one brought up this record when the Obama administration's nomination of Petraeus was being sped through the constitutional "advice and consent" process. The failure of any U.S. Senator to ask questions about Petraeus's record on these matters demonstrates the utter bankruptcy of the two political parties, and even more, of U.S. civil society as a whole. Under the leadership of Barack Obama, torture has not only not been ended, its institutionalization has been solidified from the Bush years.

The dubious Yoo/Bybee/Bradbury OLC memos have been rescinded by President Obama's executive order, but the underlying structure of the torture program, which continually metamorphizes so that its existence will not be endangered, remains. Now a primary figure involved in the torture program is head of the CIA. These are dangerous times.

What makes them even more dangerous is the extreme complacency and passivity of the U.S. press, blogger community, and human rights organizations, who never raised a peep over the nomination of Petraeus to head the CIA, and who have for the most part let violations of the UN Convention Against Torture treaty, which makes the handing of prisoners over to state authorities who are likely to torture them a crime, become a unremarkable minor detail in their political reporting and campaigning.

Training the Torturers and the Implementation of FRAGO 242

Petraeus was promoted to lieutenant general in June 2004, and was appointed the first commander of the Multi-National Security Transition Command Iraq (MNSTC). The MNSTC was organized to train Iraqi Security Forces, with the supposed aim of making them responsible for Iraqi state security. The context was the dismantling of the Iraqi Army under the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) of L. Paul Bremer. While the CPA was busy privatizing the Iraqi economy, the cobbled-together Iraqi forces were unable to fight the remnants of the Saddam Hussein regime, and the country was rent by sectarian conflict.

It was also in June 2004 that Fragmentary Order 242 was issued, instructing U.S. forces, as the UK Guardian reported, "not to investigate any breach of the laws of armed conflict, such as the abuse of detainees, unless it directly involves members of the coalition. Where the alleged abuse is committed by Iraqi on Iraqi, 'only an initial report will be made … No further investigation will be required unless directed by HQ'."

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, the Commander of US ground troops in Iraq, was the likely high official who signed off on this policy, but as the Guardian noted, "Frago 242 appears to have been issued as part of the wider political effort to pass the management of security from the coalition to Iraqi hands." The policy amounted to turning Iraqi prisoners over to security forces trained by Petraeus's MNSTC. The Iraqis tortured the prisoners, while U.S. forces were complicit, and if anyone wanted to intervene, the order tied their hands.

Frago 242 was modified in April 2005: "MNCI FRAGO 039 DTD 29 April 2005 has modified FRAGO 242 and now requires reports of Iraqi on Iraqi abuse be reported through operational channels."

Frago 039 was released in 2005. As Angus Stickler and Chris Woods at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism noted, "It is unclear from the files what happened to the reports of detainee abuse once they had been sent up the chain of command. There are indications that some may have been investigated, but it is not known whether this was by the US or if the files were handed over to the appropriate Iraqi authorities."

A likely example of Frago 242 in operation occurred during a June 29, 2004 encounter between Oregon National Guardsmen assigned to the 2nd Battalion, 162nd Infantry, and Iraqi Interior Ministry agents, as reported by Mike Francis in the Oregonian, August 2004 (as reposted by the Seattle Times). Members of the unit had observed the beating of blindfolded prisoners on the grounds of the Ministry. The story continued.

Soon after, a team of Oregon Army National Guard soldiers swept into the yard and found dozens of Iraqi detainees who said they had been beaten, starved and deprived of water for three days.

In a nearby building, the soldiers counted dozens more prisoners and what appeared to be torture devices: metal rods, rubber hoses, electrical wires and bottles of chemicals. Many of the Iraqis, including one identified as a 14-year-old boy, had fresh welts and bruises across their backs and legs.

The Guardsmen moved in, disarmed the Iraqi jailers and Lt. Col. Daniel Hendrickson of Albany, Oregon, radioed for further instructions. The instructions came. Officers up the chain of command in the Army's First Cavalry Division told Hendrickson "to return the prisoners to their abusers and immediately withdraw." The U.S. Embassy later confirmed the incident, and said that the issue was brought up with Iraqi authorities, but wouldn't disclose details, as "it would be 'inappropriate' to discuss 'details of those diplomatic and confidential conversations.' The embassy statement, we now know, was disingenuous in the extreme.

The embassy, in a written statement, said American soldiers are "compelled by the law of land warfare and core values to stop willful and unnecessary use of physical violence on prisoners." The U.S. soldiers involved in the incident, it said, "acted professionally and calmly to ease tensions and defend prisoners who needed help."

The U.S. Guardsmen who entered the Iraqi compound that day knew they had done the right thing by disarming the torturers, but felt it was wrong to move out. According to Francis, they spoke about the incident because they were "really upset." One soldier said, "They were really moved by what they'd seen." Francis wrote, "they wanted Americans to know about the actions they took to protect unresisting prisoners — and that they were ordered by U.S. military officials to walk away."

Reports of Torture After 2004

Reports of torture by Iraqi security forces continued to leak out. In 2005, Richard Galpin at BBC posted an incendiary story about the burgeoning scandal. According to the British news agency, "Iraq's new police force... [faced] mounting allegations of systematic abuse and torture of people in detention, as well as allegations of extra-judicial killings. The minority Sunni community in particular claims it is being targeted by the Shia-dominated police force."

According to Galpin, a list of different torture techniques published by Human Rights Watch at the time included "beating detainees with cables, hanging them from their wrists for long periods and giving electric shocks to sensitive parts of the body."

From a video given to the BBC by the Association of Muslim Scholars (a Sunni Muslim organisation), it seems another particularly brutal form of torture can also be added - drilling into the knees, elbows and shoulders of victims.

And according to press reports, the Shia-dominated commandos then targeting the Sunni minority were organized by -- David Petraeus. In an interview of Arun Gupta by Amy Goodman of Democracy Now!, Petraeus's part in this was described.

What we were talking about two-and-a-half years ago was Petraeus’s role in helping to set up the Special Police Commandos. In 2004, 2005, he was given the mission to train all Iraq military and police forces....

Now, one of the key things that Petraeus did was they decided -- him and his command decided -- that they were going to create this paramilitary force, the Special Police Commandos. They armed them. They funded them. They trained them. And they also issued the usual denials: “Oh, we're not giving them any weapons. This is an Iraqi initiative.” And so, now he’s saying the same thing with the Sunni militias.

So, anyway, the Special Police Commandos quickly morphed into Shiite death squads that were used against the Sunni insurgency and against Sunnis, in general, throughout Iraq.

One of the most notorious police commando units was the Wolf Brigade, which trained with U.S. forces, and was notorious for torture and extrajudicial murders in Sunni neighborhoods.

One of the most extraordinary reports on U.S. backing of the Iraqi terror police was by Peter Maass in the New York Times Magazine in May 2005. Maass was present at a meeting between himself and General Adnan Thabit, head of the Special Police Commandos. Also present was James Steele, "one of the United States military's top experts on counterinsurgency," Maass wrote. "Steele honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980's." A retired U.S. colonel, Steele was a member of General Petraeus's team working to train the police security units.

The interview with Thabit had barely started, when something bizarre and chilling occurred:

A few minutes after the interview started, a man began screaming in the main hall, drowning out the Saudi's voice. ''Allah!'' he shouted. ''Allah! Allah!'' It was not an ecstatic cry; it was chilling, like the screams of a madman, or of someone being driven mad. ''Allah!'' he yelled again and again. The shouts were too loud to ignore. Steele left the room to find out what was happening. When returned, the shouts had ceased. But soon, through the window behind me, I could hear the sounds of someone vomiting, coming from an area where other detainees were being held, at the side of the building.

Steele was not the only American involved in training the Iraqi terror police. Steve Casteel was "the senior U.S. adviser in the Ministry of Interior," working directly with Iraqi interior minister, Falah al-Nakib. According to Maass, Casteel was "a former top official in the Drug Enforcement Administration who spent much of his professional life immersed in the drug wars of Latin America. Casteel worked alongside local forces in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia, where he was involved in the hunt for Pablo Escobar, the head of the Medellin cocaine cartel."

Steele, Casteel and Petraeus have all told the press at various times that they opposed human rights abuses among Iraqi forces. Petraeus himself told New York Times reporters in May 2006 that he and his team "vigorously pursued allegations of misconduct," and that "he never received evidence of the police carrying out clearly sectarian violence, but that at his insistence three commando leaders were fired or moved to lesser positions for detainee abuse or corruption."

In a September 25, 2004 op-ed for the Washington Post, Petraeus wrote, "Helping organize, train and equip nearly a quarter-million of Iraq's security forces is a daunting task." He cited all the "progress" that had been made under his command. He noted he met "with Iraqi security force leaders every day." In a very slight nod to reports of atrocities, Petraeus wrote, "Though some have given in to acts of intimidation, many are displaying courage and resilience in the face of repeated threats and attacks on them, their families and their comrades. I have seen their determination and their desire to assume the full burden of security tasks for Iraq."

The progress and the U.S. remonstrances against torture have reportedly resulted in the suspension of a handful of Iraqi officers, but the reports about continuing torture by security forces continued, and many were revealed in the Wikileaks Iraq War Logs release earlier this year. Here is one of the reports, from August 2006. As the reader will note, while U.S. forces make a report, no investigation is initiated, and the prisoner and his torturer are said to remain at the Ramadi jail. The case is closed five days later.

*ALLEGED DETAINEE ABUSE BY IRAQI POLICE IN RAMADI ON 17 AUG 2006
SUSPECTED DETAINEE ABUSE RPTD AT 171100D AUG 06

1. DESCRIPTION OF INCIDENT/SUSPECTED VIOLATION (WHO REPORTED INCIDENT AND WHAT HAPPENED):

SGT –––––, 300TH MILITARY POLICE COMPANY, REPORTED IRAQI POLICE COMMITTING DETAINEE ABUSE AT AN IRAQI POLICE STATION IN RAMADI. SGT ––––– WITNESSED 1LT –––– WHIP A DETAINEE ACROSS HIS BACK WITH A PR-24 STRAIGHT SIDE HANDLED BATON AND 1LT –––– KICKING A SECOND DETAINEE. THAT NIGHT SGT ––––– HEARD WHIPPING NOISES WALKING THROUGH THE HALLWAY, AND OPENED A DOOR TO FIND 1LT –––– WITH A 4 GAUGE ELECTRICAL CABLE, WHIPPING THE BOTTOM OF A DETAINEE*S FEET. LATER THAT NIGHT, SGT ––––– CAUGHT 1LT –––– WHIPPING A DETAINEE ACROSS HIS BACK WITH AN ELECTRICAL CABLE. SGT ––––– DOCUMENTED EACH EVENT ON A SWORN STATEMENT FORM AND REPORTED THE INCIDENTS.

2. LOCATION (GRID COORDINATES OR OTHER REFERENCE): 38S LB 37142 99770

3. TIME OF OCCURRENCE AND TIME OF DISCOVERY: REPORTED 17 1100 AUG 06

4. WHO CAUSED (IF KNOWN) OR IDENTITY OF FRIENDLY AND ENEMY UNITS OPERATING IN THE IMMEDIATE AREA (IF KNOWN):

IRAQI POLICE FROM THE AL HURYIA IRAQI POLICE STATION

5. NAME OF WITNESSES (W/UNIT OR ADDRESS): SGT –––– ––––– –––––, 300TH MP COMPANY, MP PIT TEAM

6. UNIT POINT OF CONTACT: CPT –––– – –––– AT DNVT 551-2044 OR ––––.––––@–––––.ARMY.SMIL.MIL

7. EVIDENCE GATHERED AND ITS DISPOSITION: SWORN STATEMENTS AND PICTURES ARE ATTACHED

8. WEAPONS/EQUIPMENT INVOLVED: 4 GAUGE ELECTICAL CABLE, PR-24 BATON

9. DESCRIPTION OF DAMAGE OR INJURIES TO GOVERNMENT/CIVILIAN PROPERTY AND PERSONNEL: CIRCULAR WHIP MARKS, BLEEDING ON BACK, DARK RED BRUISING ON BACK

10. CURRENT LOCATION OF SUSPECTS AND VICTIMS (JAIL, HOSPITAL, AT SCENE, ETC.) BOTH ARE STILL AT AL HURYIA POLICE STATION

11. HOW IS THE SITE BEING SECURED? N/A

12. INVESTIGATING OFFICER. STATUS OF INVESTIGATION: NO INVESTIGATION INITIATED AT THIS POINT.

CLOSED: 22 AUG 2006

In February 2009, three years after the recognition of torture at Al Huryia police station, a U.S. military dispatch shows the Al Huryia police are still torturing prisoners, with U.S. knowledge, and no investigation. The military record merely concludes "Closed."

The case against Petraeus may be circumstantial, as we do not have a specific document that links him to torture, or even the Frago orders. But the General's culpability in these matters is highly likely, and the principle of command responsibility ties him into the policies that occurred under his command. You would have thought that there would have been a Congressional investigation of these matters, or that Petraeus would have been grilled about them at his hearing. Indeed, Petraeus explained at his recent Senate hearing that he would not rule out torture in "ticking time bomb" scenarios.

The United States has become so politically paralyzed that it cannot mount an effective political opposition to the economic fleecing being implemented currently by the executive and legislative branches of what can only be understood to be a torture state. Without a new political opposition, based on a genuine progressive popular movement, and ultimately a new political party that strives for power with a program of ending the dominance of the military and economic elites, then there is no light at the end of the tunnel, only our fear spinning solitary in the dark.