Allegations FBI and British Intelligence Tortured Kenyan Rendition Victim

Originally posted at Truthout

According to an August 17 article in The Guardian UK, lawyers representing Omar Awadh Omar, a Kenyan used car salesman who was kidnapped off the streets of Nairobi last September and rendered to Uganda, have accused the FBI and British intelligence agency MI5 and Ugandan agents of "cruel and unlawful treatment" in custody. A claim in Awadh's behalf has been filed in a British court. Despite the claims of FBI abuse, the case has not been covered in the United States.

Mr. Awadh has been charged with involvement in the July 2010 Kampala bombings, which killed 76 people who had gathered to watch the World Cup. The Somali group Al-Shabab has taken credit, saying the attack was retribution for the invasion of Somalia by the US-backed African Union Peace Keeping Mission in Somalia (AMISOM). AMISOM, made up of troops mainly from Uganda and Burundi, went into Somalia after the Ethiopian Army left following their US-backed invasion of the country in 2007-2008.

Soon after the bombings, three Kenyan nationals were illegally rendered to Uganda, and Awadh is one of at least ten who were subsequent victims of rendition to Uganda, according to Open Society Justice Initiative fellow Clara Guttridge.

According to the court claim, as described by Ian Cobain of The Guardian UK, "the Americans punched, slapped, threatened and sexually humiliated Awadh while questioning him about alleged connections with Islamist militants in east Africa and trying to persuade him to become an informant. At one point, Awadh's lawyers allege, the British intelligence officer joined in the abuse by stamping on their client's bare feet while demanding answers to his questions." He was also allegedly threatened with further rendition to Guantanamo, while an Ugandan agent "forced" a gun into Omar's mouth.

Last year, Gutteridge reported much the same about abuse meted out to Awadh, noting that after six months in prison, he did not know the nature of the charges against him. In fact, Awadh's attorneys state that FBI and British agents, who began interrogating him immediately after his rendition, wanted him to name British individuals with purported links to Somalia. He was not even questioned about the Kampala bombings.

Dean Boyd, spokesman for the National Security Division of the US Department of Justice, responded to my email query on the Omar case last April. "The United States supports the Ugandan government's efforts to bring to justice those responsible for the July 11, 2010, al-Shabaab terrorist bombings in Kampala ..." Boyd said, explaining, "The overall investigation of the July 2010 bombings is a Ugandan-led effort."

Boyd admitted "the US government has worked with the Ugandan government to investigate the July 11 Kampala bombings. In our support to and engagement with the Ugandans, we continue to stress the importance of respecting human rights, the rule of law and due process," Boyd said. While I asked "what instructions were given to FBI or Justice Department officials in regards to handling evidence of torture or other crimes by the RRU?" Boyd offered nothing more specific. He did deny any US role in the rendition, however.

According to Awadh's wife, her husband has been refused medication for a kidney problem. In addition, he has been ferried back and forth between Luzira Maximum Security Prison and the headquarters of the Ugandan police paramilitary group, Rapid Response Unit (RRU), for repeated interrogations.

There is also evidence that some of Awadh's torture has been psychological in nature. According to Cobain, "During his fourth session, Awadh says he was shown a series of pictures depicting a woman in a swimsuit, the same woman looking into a mirror which gave the impression she was overweight and the same woman on a drip [intravenous], before being asked a series of bewildering questions. He says he was also punched in the back during this session."

New Guantanamos in East Africa?

Gutteridge noted last year, "Omar Awadh's case raises serious concerns that the FBI is running - with British complicity - what is essentially a sort of decentralised, outsourced Guantánamo Bay in Kampala, under the cloak of legitimate criminal process." According to Cobain, the FBI was responsible for "most of the mistreatment" of Awadh. Meanwhile, British lawyers "are demanding that the government disclose any information it holds that supports their claim that 'the UK Security and Intelligence Services have become mixed up in serious wrongdoing'."

The Kenyan renditions to Uganda are highly reminiscent of another report by Jeremy Scahill in The Nation last month that describes a number of renditions of Kenyan nationals to Somali black site prisons in Mogadishu. There, CIA and Joint Special Operations Command agents appear to be brain-trusting the operation, despite a US presidential executive order in January 2009 removing the CIA from operation of such prisons. According to Scahill, "Human Rights Watch and Reprieve have documented that Kenyan security and intelligence forces have facilitated scores of renditions for the US and other governments, including eighty-five people rendered to Somalia in 2007 alone."

In Kampala, however, with a stronger central government and more established police and paramilitary forces, the prisons are run by the Ugandans, but American agents, in this case the FBI, appear to have a heightened presence and may be calling many of the shots.

According to his bio at The Soufan Group, FBI agent Don Borelli led a 60-person team to Uganda in July 2010 "to assist the Uganda Police Force in their investigation" of the Kampala bombings, "the largest FBI deployment since the 2000 USS Cole bombing in Yemen."

Only two days prior to Omar's kidnapping off the streets of Nairobi, two Kenyan human rights defenders were arrested after they arrived in Uganda, having come to investigate allegations of maltreatment by Kenyan prisoners held on counterterrorism charges in Uganda. The two - Kenyan high court advocate Mbugua Mureithi and Al Amin Kimathi, executive director of the Kenyan NGO, Muslim Human Rights Forum - were reportedly seized by plainclothes police, hooded and threatened with death or disappearance, before being handed over to the notorious RRU.

Mureithi was released after three days, while Kimathi, despite protests from human rights organizations, remains in prison. Uganda also detained and deported Hassan Omar, commissioner of the Kenya National Human Rights Commission and three other human rights defenders who had sought a meeting with Uganda's Chief Justice "to discuss the illegal transfer of several Kenyan nationals to Uganda and the continued detention of Kimathi." Meanwhile in May 2011, Kenya deported Gutteridge, citing "national security" concerns.

According to James A. Goldston, executive director of the Open Society Justice Initiative, the Kenyan actions "represented a flagrant attempt to silence legitimate inquiries into human rights abuses committed in East Africa in the name of countering terrorism."

The RRU itself was singled out in a special 59-page report by Human Rights Watch last April. Entitled "Violence Instead of Vigilance: Torture and Illegal Detention by Uganda's Rapid Response Unit," the report detailed a pervasive pattern of abuse.

The unit's personnel typically operate in unmarked cars, wear civilian clothing with no identifying insignia and carry a variety of guns, from pistols to larger assault rifles. The unit's members have on some occasions transported suspects in the trunks of unmarked cars.

Human Rights Watch also found that the unit routinely uses torture to extract confessions. Sixty of 77 interviewees who had been arrested by RRU told Human Rights Watch that they had been severely beaten at some point during their detention and interrogations....

Detainees were beaten on the joints with batons over the course of several days while handcuffed in stress positions with their hands under their legs. Human Rights Watch also found that RRU personnel regularly beat detainees with batons, sticks, glass bottles, bats, metal pipes, padlocks, table legs and other objects. In rare instances, the unit's officers inserted pins under detainees' fingernails or used electric shock torture.

In a October 19, 2009, State Department cable from Ambassador Jerry Lanier, US Embassy in Kampala, to Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of African Affairs Johnnie Carson, released by WikiLeaks earlier this year, the RRU was singled out along with a number of other "para-military outfits" about which there are "numerous, credible allegations of unlawful detention and torture."

Ugandan Oil

The State Department cable also outlined US interest in the development of Ugandan oil resources, after an important discovery made only a year prior to the US-backed Ugandan invasion of Somalia. It's worth noting in the quote from the cable below, given the current situation in Libya, the role Libya's TamOil played in the competition over this new resource development.

23. (SBU) In October 2006, Canadian firm Heritage Oil announced the first oil discovery on the shores of Lake Albert. The British firm Tullow Oil, has made major discoveries both around and under Lake Albert and has plans to begin producing and exporting crude oil by mid-2010. Libya's TamOil is the primary investor in a proposed pipeline from Uganda to Kenya to import fuel and possibly export crude. Chinese firms are also interested in expanding investments in Uganda's oil. The Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) is funding a feasibility study for a refinery in Uganda. Exxon/Mobile is considering a visit to Uganda later this year.

24. (SBU) Our message: Uganda's oil resources could and should be a boon for economic development and make the country less dependent on foreign assistance. We wish to support transparent management and prudent investment of oil wealth in the years ahead. LANIER

The US has been very aggressive in Eastern and Northern Africa in recent years and this is possibly related to the new oil discoveries, though the US says it's due to the operations of al-Qaeda. But whether it's in Libya, or with Islamists in Kosovo, the US has had little trouble allying itself with Islamic fundamentalists or corrupt torturing governments when it wishes to. Indeed, the CIA and Saudi Arabia in the Afghan-Soviet War of the 1980s funded Arab and Afghan fundamentalist Mujahideen with billions of dollars. Much of what has happened since then in relation to the growth of terrorism could be considered "blowback" from the policies of those years. Hopefully the US press, including progressive bloggers, will pay a lot more attention to what is happening in the name of counterterrorism in this new front on the supposed "war on terror."

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

Seven Paragraphs Are Not Enough: Release the 42 CIA Documents on Binyam Mohamed's Torture

Originally posted at Firedoglake

The recent decision of the UK High Court to release a seven paragraph summary of the torture perpetrated by U.S. agents upon Binyam Mohammed in April and early May 2002 is welcome news.  The summary, written by a British court, was derived from  42 classified CIA documents delivered to the British legal authorities as part of an investigation into the actions of MI5 in the torture and interrogation of Binyam Mohamed and other prisoners held by Pakistan. These documents purportedly describe the torture of Mohamed, and indicate the collusion of U.S., British, and Pakistani authorities in the torture.

The seven paragraph summary was enlightening on a number of points, though the information that Mohamed had been tortured in a fashion similar to Abu Zubaydah, was first reported in a book by Mohamed attorney Clive Stafford Smith in 2006. In Britain, outrage is focused upon the actions of British intelligence agency MI5, which, despite an effort by the government to censor a damning portion of the seven paragraphs, focused, according to the UK Guardian, on the charge "that MI5 had treated basic rights with contempt and had lied to the parliamentary watchdog which provides its only oversight."

In the United States, John F. Burns at the New York Times noted:

What was starkly new, however, was the Foreign Office’s conclusion that the treatment Mr. Mohamed endured, had it been carried out under the authority of British officials, would have breached international treaties banning torture. It was the first time that Britain has been so blunt about its disapproval of the interrogation techniques approved by former President George W. Bush and curtailed last year by President Obama.

“Although it is not necessary for us to categorize the treatment reported, it could readily be contended to be at the very least cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment by the United States authorities,” the document posted on the Foreign Office Web site said.

Burns failed to note that the summary paragraphs stated that Mohamed's sleep deprivation had been "carefully observed" for its "effects." The UK Guardian did not miss this point, noting:

It is also clear that the CIA, on whose behalf the Pakistanis were holding Mohamed, was ­monitoring the effects upon Mohamed.

The NYT story also buried the significance of the timeline in the torture case. As both blogger-investigative journalist Marcy Wheeler and blogger-psychologist-activist Stephen Soldz have pointed out in articles Wednesday, the use of CIA-style "enhanced interrogation" torture was directly "conducted by the United States authorities prior to 17 May 2002 as part of a new strategy designed by an expert interviewer." This puts the use of these techniques approximately ten weeks or more before the John Yoo-drafted Bybee memo on August 1, 2002, supposedly authorizing such abuse.

What about the 42 Classified CIA Documents?

Lost in all the hullabaloo around the struggle to release the seven paragraph summary of Binyam's torture is the fact that there has long been a battle over the 42 classified CIA documents themselves. Originally only seven of the 42 documents, heavily redacted, were released to Binyam Mohamed's attorneys. After a legal battle, they finally obtained the full set. The British High Court then took in October 2008 what Clare Algar at Reprieve called "the unusual step of inviting the press to make an application for the publication of details of Binyam’s mistreatment which had been removed from its original judgment at the request of the Government."

The press made their application, and also asked for the secret documents themselves, i.e., not just the redacted summary. In response, British Foreign Secretary David Milbrand shocked everyone by claiming that the U.S. had threatened to cut intelligence-sharing ties with Great Britain if the summarized information or the documents themselves were released. Evidently, this threat on behalf of the U.S. continued over from the Bush to the Obama administration.

The case was then duly litigated, leading to the release on February 10 of the seven paragraph summary. But the 42 classified documents, with all the possible information they hold on the process of the interrogation, on its planning, on the personnel involved, on the collaboration with British authorities, and on any possible experimentation based on the monitoring of the torture, remain classified and unavailable.

It is important to remember that what the documents call "sleep deprivation," was really a set of joined techniques. As I described it in an article last June, "sleep deprivation" included standing sleep deprivation, shackling in forced positions, nudity (save for a diaper!), a near-starvation diet, suspension, and, initially at least, up to 240 hours of continuous sleep deprivation. They weren't monitoring only sleep deprivation, they were monitoring a full torture program!

Is it possible they were using newly developed telemetric devices developed under a research program funded by the Army's Ft. Detrick, whose association with the CIA in the development of biological and chemical weapons, including for use in interrogations, goes back to the 1950s? Such a study was underway in 2002, studying how to measure the physiological effects of "uncontrollable stress" on subjects who underwent SERE torture as part of the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape program. The study was entitled The Warfighter's Stress Response: Telemetric and Noninvasive Assessment. While formulated for use on predicting "military performance" and assessing selection procedures for personnel, this research -- and this remains speculative -- could have been used to assess an individual's response to real-life, and not just simulated torture. One of the researchers is linked to the CIA and its Science and Technology directorate, and was also an "expert" on the Intelligence Science Board panel that produced the "Educing Information" document upon which the Obama administration is relying for a purported reform of interrogation policy.

While it was important to fight for the release of the court's summary, the fight to release the documents in this case must not end here. The 42 classified CIA documents represent a keystone in the U.S. government's contemporary torture program. It is my hope that the UK Guardian, the New York Times, and other press interests will not leave off their legal battle to receive these documents, and that the UK High Court itself will see that a full disclosure of this evidence is in the best interests of justice.

It's just possible that the release of the seven paragraphs themselves could augur a release of the full set of CIA documents. The U.S. will do everything it can to avoid this possibility. On the other hand, the summary in and of itself can represent a limited hangout of the torture program information, tantalizing, but without crucial follow-up. American citizens must call for a full, independent, open investigation into the torture program here, with complete access to records and right to subpoena, and refer the necessary cases for prosecution under due process of law.

The media narrative surrounding the release of the latest revelations on the Binyam Mohamed case is being devised even as I write. It is crucial that the demand for the release of the full set of CIA documents be made a primary component of that narrative.

Also posted at The Public Record

Torturers Told Binyam: "“We’re going to change your brain"

David Rose at the British paper The Mail got the scoop that was former Guanatanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed's "world exclusive" post-release interview. Entitled "How MI5 colluded in my torture: Binyam Mohamed claims British agents fed Moroccan torturers their questions", the article presents a brief biography of Mr. Mohamed's troubled life, including the experience of racial prejudice in the United States (Binyam is Ethiopian-born), abandonment by his father, and later the adoption of his mother's religion, Islam.

But the article's most sensational sections describe his torture by Pakistani, Moroccan, and U.S. officials, who all the while were in collaboration with British intelligence services, who not only were feeding them questions, but also withholding exculpatory evidence as well. The torture was horrendous:

Documents obtained by this newspaper - which were disclosed to Mohamed through a court case he filed in America - show that months after he was taken to Morocco aboard an illegal 'extraordinary rendition' flight by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, MI5 twice gave the CIA details of questions they wanted his interrogators to put to him, together with dossiers of photographs.

At the time, in November 2002, Mohamed was being subject to intense, regular beatings and sessions in which his chief Moroccan torturer, a man he knew as Marwan, slashed his chest and genitals with a scalpel....

... Mohamed also described how he was interrogated by an MI5 officer in Pakistan in May 2002, before his rendition to Morocco....

He said the officer knew he had already been tortured numerous times after his capture the previous month, with methods that included days of sleep deprivation, a mock execution and being beaten while being hung by his wrists for hours on end.

He said this torture in Pakistan made him confess to a plan that was never more than fantasy - to build a 'dirty' radioactive bomb.

Over and over, the article presents evidence of U.S. and British collaboration in the interrogation and torture of Binyam Mohamed. Telegrams are sent back and forth, lines of inquiry are proposed, a "case conference" is held between U.S. and British intelligence at MI5 HQ in London.

The full extent of the collaboration and the torture are partly obscured by the fact that the British High Court reluctantly (and with public protest) have acceded to the demands of the British Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, to withhold the publication of secret documentation of Mr. Mohamed's torture -- documents already seen by Mohamed's attorneys, but not the public -- because it would supposedly harm U.S.-British intelligence cooperation.

The Mail article states that Miliband lied about whether or not the Obama administration is threatening the British over revealing these secrets, as the Bush administation had. Thus, it is unclear to what extent the Obama administration is cooperating in the British suppression of the documents. The Obama administration is on record as telling BBC that it is grateful that the British are committed to state secrecy. On the other hand, a letter detailing the contents of the redacted documents sent by Mohamed's attorney to President Obama was itself mysteriously redacted. One thing is clear: we don't yet have the full story here.

In the Dark Prison: Brainwashing & Confessions

The worst part of Mohamed's captivity, by his own account, is the five months he spent at the "dark prison" the CIA ran at an undisclosed location near Kabul, Afghanistan. The Obama administration has by executive order closed all CIA prisons except those "used only to hold people on a short-term, transitory basis." One wonders if five months can be considered "short-term" or "transitory"? Given the torture evidence by Mr. Mohamed, this question is especially apposite.

From Binyam Mohamed's description of the "dark prison":

Kabul's dark prison was just that: a place where inmates spent their days and weeks in total blackness....

'The toilet in the cell was a bucket. Without light, you either find the bucket or you go on your bed,' Mohamed says.

'There were loudspeakers in the cell, pumping out what felt like about 160 watts, a deafening volume, non-stop, 24 hours a day....

'While that was happening, a lot of the time, for hour after hour, they had me shackled....

'The longest was when they chained me for eight days on end, in a position that meant I couldn't stand straight nor sit.

'I couldn't sleep. I had no idea whether it was day or night.

'You got a shower once a week, with your arms chained above you, stripped naked, in the dark, with someone else washing you.

'The water was salty and afterwards you felt dirtier than when you went in. It wasn't a shower for washing: it was for humiliation.'

In Kabul, Mohamed says the food was also contaminated, and he often suffered from sickness and diarrhoea....

'The floor was made of cement dust. Whatever movement you made, the air would be full of cement and I started getting breathing problems.

' My bed was a thin mattress on the floor, surrounded by that dust.'

And what was all this torture for? According to Mr. Mohamed, it was during his stay at the Dark Prison that U.S. interrogators went beyond inducing confessions. They wanted him to finger other individuals, and use him to testify in the military commissions trials they were planning. Later, when Mohamed arrived in Guantanamo in September 2004, interrogators got worried Binyam would testify he only "confessed" or gave information because he was tortured, and tried to conduct "clean" interrogations, so they could say the testimony was uncoerced. They demanded he give his confession "freely". After Obama was elected president and announced Guantanamo would close, Mohamed says his treatment became more brutal.

The entire Mail article goes into much, much more detail, and makes important reading for those trying to understand what kinds of crimes the U.S. and UK governments have committed when they undertook the torturing of individuals in their custody. Andy Worthington has also written an excellent summary and review of Binyam's interview, and furthermore, writes from the standpoint of one who has followed both Mr. Mohamed's case, and that of a myriad of other Guantanamo prisoners for years now.

Andy Worthington's article makes abundantly clear that the torture of prisoners like Binyam Mohamed was not about, or at least not solely about, the collection of information. It was about the manufacture of information, including false confessions and fingering others for prosecution or further torture. In an earlier interview with Binyam Mohamed's attorney, Clive Stafford Smith:

Binyam explained that, between the savage beatings and the razor cuts to his penis, his torturers “would tell me what to say.” He added that even towards the end of his time in Morocco, they were still “training me what to say,” and one of them told him, “We’re going to change your brain.”

This emphasis on brainwashing -- for that is the popular terminology for such an assault on the psyche of a prisoner -- is a key component of the kind of psychological torture that was researched by both the United Kingdom and the United States in the years following World War II. It highlighted the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, fear, stress positions, manipulation of the environment, of food, the use of humiliation and both sensory deprivation and sensory overload upon the prisoner. The idea was to overwhelm the nervous system and make a human being collapse without a blow being made, without scars, without evidence usable in court.

Much to the chagrin of some in the government, I suppose, the Moroccans had some ideas of their own regarding torture, and it included the use of razor blades. According to the Mail account, there are plenty of pictures of Mr. Mohamed's scarred penis in his files. That may be bad news for somebody, if anyone's head is ever going to fall over this monstrosity of a treatment.

Prosecute Those Who Ordered and Operated the Torture Program

But the real criminals sat or still sit in the highest chairs of government. The political will to hold them to account is crippled by the need to save the integrity of the system in the eyes of a scared and cynical populace -- scared by a collapsing economy, and cynical because they too have lost all faith in the integrity of their leaders, and are placing all their hopes now in the charismatic Barack Obama. For his part, Obama has indicated he will be more socially progressive than his predecessor -- he just eliminated the anti-science blockade of funds on stem cell research that Bush had used to hamstring such projects.

But Obama has also indicated that he will go so far on torture and national security reform and no farther. He has no intention of significantly reforming the CIA. He plans to leave a substantial remnant force of up to 50,000 troops or "advisers" in Iraq after a U.S. "withdrawal"... two or more years from now. He is escalating U.S. military presence in Afghanistan, and has taken actions to make prisoners in that theater of operations even less available to review of conditions by any U.S. court than were the prisoners in Guantanamo. All the while, he maintains that the Army Field Manual, with its reliance on isolation, sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, and fear, along with loose controls on stress positions and drugging of prisoners, is the "gold standard" of U.S. interrogation of "illegal enemy combatants."

The Binyam Mohamed case is one that wakes people up, at least it has in Great Britain. (See Glenn Greenwald's story comparing the U.S. to British coverage of the case.) But damn if I don't know what it will take to unfreeze U.S. society on this topic. Torture remains a little understood and embarrassing subject in U.S. circles. It's dimly recognized that if the lid were totally taken off, much of the establishment leadership in the U.S. would be revealed as culpable, or at least compromised. Hence, mainstream opinion makers are attempting to keep whatever scandals within "reasonable" limits.

Politics can be strange sometimes. The mainstream opinion makers are usually pretty good at what they do, especially the left-wing versions of them. But they don't often have to deal with such incendiary material, and a dedicated coterie of attorneys, bloggers, journalists, and even some politicians and military officers, who don't want to see this issue die before accountability takes place.

Glenn and Jane on Democracy Now! -- Has Torture Been "Wiped Out"?`

Glenn Greenwald and Jane Mayer appeared on Amy Goodman's Democracy Now! the other day. There was a lot to be grateful for in letting these two important voices get further exposure. Both Mayer and Greenwald agreed there were things to be concerned about regarding the Obama administration's positions re suppression of state secrets privilege in cases such as that of Binyam Mohammed. Both agreed that the Bush Administration's organization of state torture deserved investigations and prosecutions. Both warned that dangers remain for those who would see the reestablishment of basic civil liberties.

While there is much to praise in the work of these intrepid journalists (see Glenn Greenwald's column at Salon.com on any given day, or read Jane Mayer's book, The Dark Side), a few of their comments at Democracy Now! bear further scrutiny.

Mayer, at one point, took umbrage at what she felt was Greenwald's overly negative representation of the Obama administration's actions thus far concerning torture, interrogations, rendition, and secrecy:

And they —- you know, I’m giving them maybe a little bit more credit than Glenn is, because I think what they did in their first week in office was stupendous. They put out executive orders that said, from here on out, everybody’s got rights, everybody’s covered by the Geneva Conventions, the ICRC gets to see every detainee, we’re closing the black site prisons, we’re going to shut down Guantanamo. They are moving on —- these things are not nothing; these things are really seriously great reforms.

Greenwald replied, in part (emphasis added):

Well, I mean, I actually agree with Jane that it’s a mixed picture, more than perhaps my answer might have suggested, because I was addressing two specific areas where I think the Obama administration has done the wrong thing. But she’s right that the executive orders issued in the first week were promising and encouraging, and there are complexities and conflicting pressures. They need to make sure the CIA doesn’t revolt over the idea that, you know, they’re going to be dragged into court for what they did. They’re figuring out ways to try and keep some of these secrets without becoming complicit in them....

As far as looking forward, you know, those executive orders were good, and they were encouraging, but they leave some of the trickiest questions open. You know, are we going to close Guantanamo but then move those due process-abridging military commissions inside the United States and call them national security courts, where they might be even worse? Are we going to, as you just asked and as Leon Panetta suggested, preserve some of the rendition policies that have led to such severe abuse and some of the most grotesque acts of the last eight years? I mean, these are all good questions that are very much unresolved.

There are two pertinent points I'd like to make here. One, Mayer's accolades regarding the Obama executive orders on torture and interrogation appear overly optimistic. While Obama and his team deserve credit for removing (for now) the CIA's approval for "enhanced interrogation techniques", such as waterboarding, and a closing down of CIA prisons, it left the door open for changes in the near future, and allowed the CIA to still operate prisons for unspecified short-term prisoners. Would that mean, say, the three or six month imprisonment and torture of a suspect by means of sensory deprivation, isolation, sleep deprivation and manipulation of fears, or administration of short-acting psychotropic medications?

The latter is not an inapposite question, as all of these techniques are allowed by the current Army Field Manual, which by executive order of Barack Obama is now the standard operating procedure for interrogations by governmental and military agencies. And furthermore, I know that Jane Mayer knows this, because I emailed her to inform her of my articles on the subject, and she emailed back that it was something she would look into.

Besides the information I provided, Ms. Mayer could have perused some of the statements of Center for Constitutional Rights or Physicians for Human Rights, who have indicated their opposition to these aspects of the Army Field Manual and its Appendix M, and asked the current administration to rescind these techniques.

Greenwald's reply to Mayer shows that understands the ongoing problems with the Obama administration's actions thus far. While he has yet to mention the problems with the Army Field Manual, he doesn't pretend that Obama's reforms have totally ended any danger of torture by the current administration, which is how Mayer described the current situation in her interview with Terri Gross of NPR's Fresh Air program on 2/18/2009. She told Gross that when Obama's administration put all detainees held by the U.S. under the Geneva Conventions, they "wiped out the whole issue of torture" (quote can be heard 24 minutes into the interview).

Now, maybe Jane Mayer knows more that I do. Literally. The new executive order, "Ensuring Lawful Interrogations" has the following subsection:

[3](c) Interpretations of Common Article 3 and the Army Field Manual. From this day forward, unless the Attorney General with appropriate consultation provides further guidance, officers, employees, and other agents of the United States Government may, in conducting interrogations, act in reliance upon Army Field Manual 2 22.3, but may not, in conducting interrogations, rely upon any interpretation of the law governing interrogation -- including interpretations of Federal criminal laws, the Convention Against Torture, Common Article 3, Army Field Manual 2 22.3, and its predecessor document, Army Field Manual 34 52 -- issued by the Department of Justice between September 11, 2001, and January 20, 2009.

The provision by which the Army Field Manual claims that its techniques are legal pertains to legal reviews done by "senior DOD figures at the secretarial level, by the Joint Staff, by each of the combatant commanders and their legal advisers, by each of the service secretaries and service chiefs and their legal advisers, in addition to the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the director of National Intelligence, who coordinated laterally with the CIA." It was also "favorably reviewed" by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department.

If all those legal opinions regarding Army Field Manual 2-22.3 are now rescinded, where does that leave the techniques enumerated within its Appendix M and elsewhere, including the use of partial sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, the use of fear and humiliation, isolation, and other objectionable techniques that many legal observers have termed as cruel, inhumane, and degrading, if not torture? I don't know. But leaving these techniques still in the document is like leaving a landmine intact with its fuse and only placing red flags around it. The document is still highly dangerous and violates Geneva and the Convention Against Torture. I would note that with or without legal opinions, the drafters of the AFM took care to make Common Article 3 the minimal criteria. Common Article 3 does not ban use of "coercion" on detainees, something that is specifically spelled out in the full conventions governing both POWs and Civilians.

Maybe Jane Mayer knows what the Obama administration plans to do in regards to new legal opinions on the AFM. She certainly may have the sources. But I don't put a lot of stock on intimations of insider knowledge, and besides, Mayer has suggested no such special knowledge on this point. Hence, her assertion that the issue of torture is now "wiped out" appears precipitous at best.

As for Glenn Greenwald's comments, I have no such bone to pick with its content. But I did think he revealed a certain aspect of the current situation politically that isn't emphasized enough. In commenting on the Obama administration's approach to these problems he indicated that wants to "make sure the CIA doesn’t revolt over the idea that... they’re going to be dragged into court for what they did."

What sort of a revolt does Greenwald have in mind? And why should we be so worried about it? Will the CIA go on strike? Or will they do something worse than that, i.e., strike out somehow at those they perceive as their enemies?

It's not the "revolt" aspect that is most telling. It's that a primary player in this scandal, the CIA, has so much power of intimidation, backed up by very little actual accountability to anyone. Senator Levin and the Senate Armed Services Committee did an incredible job investigating detainee abuse by the Department of Defense, but they had almost no cooperation from the CIA. The CIA's Inspector General John Helgerson reportedly wrote a stinging report in 2004 on CIA torture abuse, including the deaths of prisoners in custody, but the report has been classified. Some enterprising reporter may want to ask Obama about that at his next press conference. (Helen Thomas, are you listening?)

Over thirty years since the worst scandals related to CIA power and abuse were reported, the agency still retains its incredible power and secrecy. Its tentacles reach into the military in ways that we have yet to fully understand. (See the participation of the CIA's General Council as represented in the minutes from a meeting about interrogations and torture at Guantanamo in October 2002.) Without understanding the full consequences of how the power of the CIA is wielded in Washington, we cannot make a certain assessment of the issues at stake nor where they stand.

One could also, by the way, add in any problematic response by the military-surveillance complex to the fight against limitless wiretapping by the U.S. government. The extent of the surveillance is wonderfully, if scarily, presented in James Bamford's excellent new book, The Shadow Factory: The Ultra-Secret NSA from 9/11 to the Eavesdropping on America. Bamford documents the size of this empire, which includes many tens of thousands of employees and gigantic corporations -- not even counting the ongoing collaboration of the telecommunications industry in the huge surveillance scheme collecting all our telephone calls, e-mails, and Internet browsing. Along with Mayer's Dark Side, The Shadow Factory provides a two-volume introduction into the secret life of American intelligence.