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There has been no shortage of proof that the US has been torturing people as has been proven in the latest revelations of how far up the chain of command this went. The US is controlled by psychopathic fascists and whatever they do to their enemies they are prepared to do to their own people. As we watch our biosphere unravel from anthropogenic climate change we can expect their outrageous inhuman behaviour to get vastly worse.
Torture is good, Arbeit macht frei.
---Kevin Hester
Senate report being used to whitewash Obama’s rehabilitation of torture
Torture is good, Arbeit macht frei.
---Kevin Hester
Senate report being used to whitewash Obama’s rehabilitation of torture
Nafeez
Ahmed
11
December, 2014
The
grizzly details of CIA
torture have, finally, been at least partly aired through the
release this Tuesday of the executive summary to a landmark Senate
intelligence committee report.
The extent of the torture has been covered extensively across the
media, and is horrifying - unless you’re a FOX News pundit. But
much of the media coverage of this issue is missing the crucial
bigger picture: the deliberate rehabilitation of torture under the
Obama administration, and its systematic use to manufacture false
intelligence to justify endless war.
Torture
victims, who had been detained by the US national security apparatus
entirely outside any sort of recognizable functioning system of due
process, endured a litany of extreme abuses normally associated with
foreign dictatorships: 180 hour sleep deprivation, forced ‘rectal
feeding’, rectal ‘examinations’ using ‘excessive force’,
standing for dozens of hours on broken limbs, water-boarding, being
submerged in iced baths, and on and on and on.
Yet
for the most part, it has been assumed that the CIA’s ‘enhanced
interrogation program’, originated under the Bush administration
after 9/11, was a major “aberration” from normal CIA practice –
as one US former military prosecutor put it in The
Guardian.
On
BBC Newsnight, yesterday, presenter Emily Maitlis asked former
National Security Adviser under Carter, Zbigniew Brzezinski, about
the problem of “rogue elements in the CIA,” and whether this was
inevitable due to the need for secrecy in intelligence.
High-level
sanction
Media
coverage of the Senate report has largely whitewashed the extent to
which torture has always been an integral and systematic intelligence
practice since the Second World War, continuing even today under the
careful recalibration of Obama and his senior military intelligence
officials. The key function of torture, largely overlooked by the
pundits, is its role in manufacturing nebulous threats that
legitimize the existence and expansion of the national security
apparatus.
The
CIA’s post-9/11 torture program was formally approved
at the highest levels of the civilian administration. We have known
for years that torture was officially sanctioned by at least
President Bush, Vice President Cheney, former National Security
Advisor Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and
Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA directors George Tenet and
Michael Hayden, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.
Yet
the focus on the Bush administration serves a useful purpose. While
the UN has called for prosecutions
of Bush officials, Obama himself is excused on the pretext that he
banned domestic torture in 2009, and reiterated the ban
abroad this November.
Even
Dan Froomklin of The Intercept congratulated the November move as a
“win” for the “good guys.” Indeed, with the release of the
Senate report, Obama’s declaration that he has ended “the CIA’s
detention and interrogation program” has been largely uncritically
reported by both mainstream and progressive media, reinforcing this
narrative.
Rehabilitating
the torture regime
Yet
Obama did not ban torture in 2009, and has not rescinded it now. He
instead rehabilitated
torture with a carefully crafted Executive Order that has
received little scrutiny. He demanded, for instance, that
interrogation techniques be made to fit the US Army Field Manual,
which complies with the Geneva Convention and has prohibited torture
since 1956.
But
in 2006, revisions were made to the Army Field Manual, in particular
through ‘Appendix M’, which contained interrogation techniques
that went far beyond the original Geneva-inspired restrictions of the
original version of the manual. This includes 19 methods of
interrogation and the practice of extraordinary rendition. As pointed
out by US psychologist Jeff Kaye who has worked extensively with
torture victims, a new UN Committee Against Torture (UNCAT) review
of the manual shows that a wide-range of torture techniques continue
to be deployed by the US government, including isolation, sensory
deprivation, stress positions, chemically-induced psychosis,
adjustments of environmental and dietary rules, among others.
Indeed,
the revelations contained in the Senate report are a mere fraction of
the totality of torture techniques deployed by the CIA and other
agencies. Murat Kurnaz, a Turkish citizen born and raised in Germany
who was detained in Guantanomo for five years, has for instance
charged
that he had been subjected to prolonged solitary confinement,
repeated beatings, water-dunking, electric shock treatment, and
suspension by his arms, by US forces.
On
January 22nd,
2009, retired Admiral Dennis Blair, then Obama’s director of
national intelligence, told the Senate
intelligence committee that the Army Field Manual would be
amended to allow new
forms of harsh interrogation, but that these changes would remain
classified:
“We
have large amounts of unclassified doctrine for our troops to
use, but we don’t put anything in there that our enemies can
use against us. And we’ll figure it out for this manual… there
will be some sort of document that’s widely available in an
unclassified form, but the specific techniques that can provide
training value to adversaries, we will handle much more
carefully.”
Obama’s
supposed banning of the CIA’s secret rendition programs was also a
misnomer. While White House officials insisted that from now on,
detainees would not be rendered to “any country that engages in
torture,” rendered detainees were already being sent to countries
in the EU that purportedly do not sanction torture – where they
were then tortured
by the CIA.
Obama
did not really ban the CIA’s use of secret prisons either,
permitting
indefinite detention of people without due process “on a
short-term transitory basis.
Half
a century of torture as a system
What
we are seeing now is not the Obama administration putting an end to
torture, but rather putting an end to the open
acknowledgement of the use of torture as a routine intelligence
practice.
But
the ways of old illustrate that we should not be shocked by the
latest revelations. Declassified CIA
training manuals from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and 90s, prove that
the CIA has consistently practiced torture long before the Bush
administration attempted to legitimize the practice publicly.
In
his seminal study of the subject, A
Question of Torture,
US historian Prof Alfred W. McCoy of the University of
Wisconsin-Madison proves using official documents and interviews with
intelligence sources that the use of torture has been a systematic
practice of US and British intelligence agencies, sanctioned at the
highest levels, over “the past half century.” Since the Second
World War, he writes, a “distinctive US covert-warfare doctrine…
in which psychological torture has emerged as a central if
clandestine facet of American foreign policy.”
The
psychological paradigm deployed the CIA fused two methods in
particular, “sensory disorientation” and so-called
“self-inflicted pain.” These methods were based on intensive
“behavioural research that made psychological torture NATO’s
secret weapon against communism and cognitive science the handmaiden
of state security.”
“From
1950 to 1962,” found McCoy, “the CIA became involved in torture
through a massive mind-control effort, with psychological warfare and
secret research into human consciousness that reached a cost of a
billion dollars annually.”
The
pinnacle of this effort was the CIA’s Kubark
Counterintelligence Interrogation
handbook finalized in 1963, which determined the agency’s
interrogation methods around the world. In the ensuing decade, the
agency trained over a million police officers across 47 countries in
torture. A later incarnation of the CIA torture training doctrine
emerged under Freedom of Information in the form of the 1983 Human
Resources Training Exploitation Manual.
Power…
and propaganda
One
of the critical findings of the Senate report is that torture simply
doesn’t work, and consistently fails to produce meaningful
intelligence. So why insist on its use? For McCoy, the addiction to
torture itself is a symptom of a deep-seated psychological disorder,
rather than a rational imperative: “In sum, the powerful often turn
to torture in times of crisis, not because it works but because it
salves their fears and insecurities with the psychic balm of
empowerment.”
He
is right, but in the post-9/11 era, there is more to the national
security apparatus’ chronic torture addiction than this.
It
is not a mere accident that torture generates vacuous intelligence,
but nevertheless continues to be used and justified for intelligence
purposes. For instance, the CIA claimed that its torture of alleged
9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) led to the discovery and
thwarting of a plot to hijack civilian planes at Heathrow and crash
them into the airport and buildings in Canary Wharf. The entire plot,
however, was an invention
provoked by torture that included waterboarding, “facial and
abdominal slaps, the facial grab, stress positions, standing sleep
deprivation” and “rectal rehydration.”
As
one former senior CIA official who had read all KSM’s interrogation
reports told Vanity
Fair, “90 percent of it was total fucking bullshit.” Another
ex-Pentagon analyst said that torturing KSM had produced “no
actionable intelligence.”
Torture
also played a key role in the much-hyped London ricin
plot. Algerian security services alerted British intelligence in
January 2003 to the so-called plot after interrogating and torturing
a ‘terrorist suspect’, former British resident Mohammed Meguerba.
We now know there was no plot. Four of the defendants were acquitted
of terrorism and four others had the cases against them abandoned.
Only Kamal Bourgass was convicted after he murdered Special Branch
Detective Constable Stephen Oake during a raid. Former British
ambassador to Uzbekistan, Craig Murray, has also blown the whistle on
how the CIA would render ‘terror suspects’ to the country to be
tortured by Uzbek secret police, including being boiled alive. The
confessions generated would be sent to the CIA and MI6 to be fed into
‘intelligence’ reports. Murray described the reports as
“bollocks,” replete with false information not worth the
“bloodstained paper” they are written on.
Many
are unaware that the 9/11 Commission report is exactly such a
document. Nearly a third of the report’s footnotes reference
information obtained from detainees subject to ‘enhanced’
interrogation by the CIA. In 2004, the commission demanded that the
CIA conduct “new rounds of interrogations” to get answers to its
questions. As investigative reporter Philip Shennon pointed out in
Newsweek,
this has “troubling implications for the credibility of the
commission’s final report” and “its account of the 9/11 plot
and al-Qaeda’s history.” Which is why lawyers for the chief 9/11
mastermind suspects now say after the release of the Senate report
that the case for prosecution may well unravel.
Not surprising if a third of the report is merely ‘bollocks.’
That
torture generates false information has long been known to the
intelligence community. Much of the CIA’s techniques are derived
from reverse engineering Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape
(SERE) training, where US troops are briefly exposed in controlled
settings to abusive interrogation techniques used by enemy forces, so
that they can better resist treatment they might face if they are
captured. SERE training, however, adopted tactics used by Chinese
Communists against American soldiers during the Korean War for the
purpose of eliciting false confessions for propaganda purposes,
according to a Senate Armed Services Committee report
in 2009.
Torture:
core mechanism to legitimize threat projection
By
deploying the same techniques against ‘terror suspects,’ the
intelligence community was not seeking to identify real threats: it
was seeking to manufacture threats for the purpose of justifying war.
As David
Rose found after interviewing “numerous counterterrorist
officials from agencies on both sides of the Atlantic,” their
unanimous verdict was that “coercive methods” had squandered
massive resources to manufacture “false leads, chimerical plots,
and unnecessary safety alerts.” Far from exposing any deadly plots,
torture led only to “more torture” of supposed accomplices of
‘terror suspects’ “while also providing some misleading
‘information’ that boosted the administration’s argument for
invading Iraq.” But the Iraq War was not about responding to
terrorism. According to declassified British Foreign Office files, it
was about securing
control over Persian Gulf oil and gas resources, and opening them
up to global markets to avert a portended energy crisis.
In
other words, torture plays a pivotal role in the Pentagon’s posture
of permanent global war: generating spurious overblown ‘intelligence’
that can be fed-in to official security narratives of imminent
terrorist threats everywhere, in turn requiring evermore empowerment
of the security agencies, and legitimizing military expansionism in
strategic regions.
The
Obama administration is now exploiting the new Senate report to
convince the world that the intelligence community’s systematic
embroilment in torture was merely a Bush-era aberration that is now
safely in the past.
Do
not be fooled. Obama has rehabilitated and recalibrated the covert
torture apparatus, and is attempting to leverage the torture report’s
damning findings to claim moral high ground his administration
doesn’t have. The torture regime is alive and well – but it has
been put back in the box of classified secrecy to continue without
public scrutiny.
Dr.
Nafeez Ahmed is an
investigative journalist, bestselling author and international
security scholar. Formerly of The Guardian, he writes the ‘System
Shift’ column for VICE’s Motherboard, and is the winner of a 2015
Project Censored Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism for
his Guardian work. He is the author of A
User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization: And How to Save It
(2010), and the scifi thriller novel ZERO
POINT, among other books. His work on the root causes and covert
operations linked to international terrorism officially contributed
to the 9/11 Commission and the 7/7 Coroner’s Inquest. If you found
this article useful, you can support Nafeez’s journalism via his
upcoming project, Insurge.
Obama
and the Senate Report
Torture
is Good?
by
CHRIS FLOYD
10
December, 2014
A
truncated version of the Senate investigation into the CIA’s Terror
War torture regime has finally been released. Even in its limited
form, it details an operation of vile depravity, one which would
plunge a civilized nation into a profound crisis of conscience and
spark a deep and anguished debate on how best to transform a system
of government — and a national ethos — that could lead to such
putrid crimes. It would also occasion a wide-ranging effort to
subject the originators, perpetrators and accomplices of the torture
program to the full measure of legal punishment they deserve.
Needless
to say, nothing like that is going to happen in America. Indeed, even
before the report was released, the New York Times — the
standard-bearer and shaper of “decent” liberal thought for the
nation — was splashing an opinion piece on the front page of its
website, demanding that we “Pardon Bush and Those Who Tortured.”
This was the very first “think piece” pushed by the Times on the
morning of the report’s release.
I’m
sure that by the end of the day, the dust will have already settled
into the usual ruts. The Hard Right — and its pork-laden publicists
— will denounce the investigation and continue to champion torture,
as they have done in the weeks running up to the release. The
somewhat Softer Right that constitutes the “liberal” wing of the
ruling Imperial Party (and its outriders in the “progressive”
media) will wring their hands for a bit — as they did during the
multitude of previous revelations about systematic torture, White
House death squads, Stasi-surpassing surveillance programs, war
profiteering, military aggression and so on.
Then they will return to
what is always their main business at hand: making sure that someone
from their faction of the Imperial Party is in the driver’s seat of
the murderous War-and-Fear Machine that has now entirely engulfed
American society.
Speaking
of the Machine, what has been the reaction of the current driver, the
belaurelled prince of progressivism, Barack Obama? He sent out the
present head of the CIA, John Brennan, an “Obama confidante,” as
the Guardian notes, to … defend the use of torture.
You
see, one of the main points of the report was that the abominable
practices ordered at the highest levels of the American government
and used far more widely than previously admitted were not even
effective. This is, of course, the most damning criticism one can
make of the soul-drained technocrats who staff the Empire. Morality
and humanity be damned; the real problem was that torture didn’t
work. It produced reams of garbage and falsehood from hapless victims
who, like torture victims the world over, from time immemorial ,
simply regurgitated what they thought their tormentors wanted to
hear.
So
in the end, the torture regime was not only ineffective, it was
counterproductive: this is the report’s conclusion. But it is this
that the Technocrat-in-Chief cannot bear. And so he sent his
confidante Brennan out to refute this heinous charge. Brennan
actually got up in public and said, openly, that torture did work and
that it’s a good thing:
“Our
review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom EITs were
used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans,
capture terrorists, and save lives. The intelligence gained from the
program was critical to our understanding of al-Qaida and continues
to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day,” Brennan said.
“EIT”
is, of course, the technocratic euphemism for the systematic
brutalization of helpless, captive human beings by wretched cowards
armed with the power of the state and backed to the hilt by national
leaders. Brennan — Obama’s confidante — says, in the name of
the president, that torture “saved lives.” What’s more, he
admits that Obama is still using the fruits of the torture program to
“inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.”
Let’s
say this again: the conclusion of the Barack Obama administration is
that the use of torture is a good thing, and that it is still
“informing” its Terror War operations “to this day.”
One
of the chief objections mouthed by the torture champions opposed to
the release of the report was that public exposure of these crimes
would rouse anger and anti-American feeling around the world. This
was always a specious argument, of course; the people targeted by
Washington’s Terror War have always known full well what is being
done to them and theirs. This latest report will merely be another
confirmation, another tranche of evidence to add to the mountain of
atrocity they have experienced.
No,
it is not the report itself, but the reaction of the American
establishment — particularly the Obama Administration itself —
that will be the true scandal, a new outrageous slap in the face. A
door opens up on a sickening chamber of horror …. and all that
Obama can say is that torture is good; yea, it is even salvific, it
saves lives, it is good and effective and necessary and we need it.
Torture
is good. That is Barack Obama’s takeaway from the Senate report. It
is astounding — or would be astounding, if we were not living in an
age given over to state terror and elite rapine.
Chris
Floyd
is a columnist for CounterPunch Magazine. His blog, Empire
Burlesque, can be found at www.chris-floyd.com.
This
is pure fascism run rampant.
"Mr.
Obama could pardon George J. Tenet for authorizing torture at the
C.I.A.’s black sites overseas, Donald H. Rumsfeld for authorizing
the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison, David S. Addington,
John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee for crafting the legal cover for
torture, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for overseeing it all. "
Murderers
pardoning murders.
---Kevin
Hester
ACLU
Calls on Obama to Pardon Bush Officials for Torture
9
December, 2014
In
the run-up to the release of the Senate’s scathing report on CIA
interrogation techniques, American Civil Liberties Union Director
Anthony Romero called on President Barack Obama to pardon George W.
Bush and Bush administration officials for their hand in allowing
those techniques. Romero argued that a pardon would establish
precedent—torture is a crime that requires a pardon. Without that
acknowledgment, he said, there is little legal pressure preventing
techniques like those outlined in the Senate report from being used
again.
"The
spectacle of the president’s granting pardons to torturers still
makes my stomach turn," Romero wrote in a New
York Times editorial.
"But doing so may be the only way to ensure that the American
government never tortures again."
George
W. Bush authorized the "enhanced interrogation" program
following the attacks of September 11, 2001. The Senate’s
report says
that Bush requested that he not be told the locations of CIA
detention sites “to ensure he would not accidentally disclose the
information.”
The
report also indicates that at the direction of the White House, both
the secretaries of State and Defense were not briefed on the
specifics of the program until September 2003.
"An
internal CIA email from July 2003 noted that "the [White House]
is extremely concerned [Secretary Colin] Powell would blow his stack
if he were to be briefed on what's been going on," the report
says.
In
February 2008, the Senate and the House of Representatives passed
legislation limiting the CIA to using “only interrogation
techniques authorized by the Army Field Manual.” Bush vetoed the
measure a month later.
While
Obama admitted
earlier this year that "we tortured some folks," nothing
suggest any officials will be punished in connection with the CIA
report's findings.
Attorney General Eric Holder announced
in 2012
that no criminal charges would be brought against individuals
responsible for CIA waterboarding, or the deaths of two prisoners in
CIA custody. In 2009, Obama said "it’s
important to look forward and not backwards" with regards to an
investigation into CIA interrogations.
The
Obama administration did charge former CIA official John C. Kiriakou
for leaking the identities of members of the agency who participated
in the interrogations to the press. Kiriakou is currently
serving
a 30-month sentence.
CIA
chief challenges torture report claims, defends Bush-era tactics
:
RT,
11
December, 2014
The
head of the Central Intelligence Agency defended his office’s past
use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” on Thursday, two days
after a Senate panel published a grim account of the torture tactics
used on detainees under the Bush administration.
In
his first remarks since the Senate Intelligence Committee released
its so-called “torture
report”concerning
the CIA’s former interrogation practices, agency director John
Brennan challenged claims contained therein that intel officials ever
intended
to mislead Congress or the public. Some officers, however,
fell short of being held accountable, he acknowledged.
Brennan
claimed the CIA didn’t intentionally deceive the president and the
public during his rare, 45-minute address, as the Senate report had
stated, and also attempted to counter claims that the use of
controversial tactics had no impact on eliciting intelligence from
detainees. And although the agency head admitted the
CIA has room for
improvement, he said that “the nation and this agency in
particular
did a lot of things right” following the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks when the United States intelligence community found
itself ill prepared and in “uncharted territory.”
“We
had little experience housing detainees, and precious few of our
officers were trained interrogators," Brennan said of the CIA.
“But the president authorized the effort six days after 9/11, and
it was our job to carry it out.”
The
United States president who authorized the CIA’s post-9/11
policies, George
W. Bush, and his vice president, Dick Cheney,
defended the intelligence community’s controversial tactics earlier
this week concurrent with the release of the Senate panel’s
long-awaited report. Some lawmakers on Capitol Hill have not agreed
with the Bush administration’s take, however, with Sen. Mark Udall
(D-Colorado) going
as far as to urge Brennan to resign from the CIA
during a lengthy speech on the Senate floor early Wednesday.
But
although Brennan did not head the CIA during the Bush administration
– he was confirmed by the US Senate to take that role only 1.5
years ago by President Barack Obama – he stood by the agency on
Thursday and defended the enhanced interrogation techniques, or EITs,
described at length in this week’s report, saying that some of the
detainees held by the CIA and subjected to such tactics did, in fact,
disclose critical information. Whether that intel was a result of
enduring days of sleep deprivation, waterboarding, or any of the
other tactics detailed in the Senate report, however, is impossible
to know, Brennan said.
On
the contrary, the Senate report concluded that the use of torture
tactics was ineffective, unnecessary, and often led to detainees
disclosing false information in hopes of having the EITs end. Brennan
agreed that some agents went over the line in the immediate aftermath
of 9/11, but insisted that EITs did without a doubt play some sort of
role with respect to successfully getting critical information out of
suspected terrorists.
The
“cause and effect”
between those torture tactics and the end result “is
unknown and unknowable,”
Brennan said. “But for
someone to say that there was no intelligence of value, of use, that
came from those detainees once they were subjected to EITs, I think
that…lacks any foundation at all.”
“In
a limited number of cases, agency officers used interrogation
techniques that
had not been authorized,” Brennan admitted at one
point during Thursday’s
address, adding that he personally
considers those tactics to be “abhorrent.”
“None
of these lapses should be excused, downplayed or denied,” Brennan
added. Even if Brennan did acknowledge he considered those lapses to
be “abhorrent,”
he refused to refer to EITs as “torture” when
asked by an Associated Press reporter during Thursday’s event.
“First
of all, I certainly agree that there were times when CIA officers
exceeded the policy guidance that was given and the authorized
techniques that were approved and determined to be lawful. They went
outside of the bounds,” he said. “And they were harsh, as I said,
in some instances, I consider them abhorrent.”
“I
will leave to others how they might want to label those
activities,” Brennan said, “
but for me it was something
that was certainly regrettable.”
Elsewhere
in Thursday’s address, Brennan challenged claims from the Senate
committee concerning the CIA’s alleged untrustworthiness, saying
the agency takes "exceptional
pride in providing truth to power.”
“I
look back at the record and I see that this was a workforce that was
trying to do
the
right thing,” Brennan added. “I cannot say with certainty whether
or not
individuals acted with complete honesty when I look at what
went on at the time,” adding, “there were clearly questions about
why certain techniques were sed.”
Indeed,
the Senate Intelligence Committee did raise numerous questions in the
lengthy, 500-plus-page executive summary of their report published
this week
about the CIA’s torture program. But while Brennan
blasted the congressional
panel during Thursday’s talk as having
mischaracterized the CIA as untruthful,
he will likely be asked to
explain further in the near future about one of the
Senate’s
findings in particular that has contrasted sharply with the
director’s determinations: answering to a McClatchy reporter
curious as to whether Brennan stands by the statement that only three
individuals were waterboarded by the CIA
as previously admitted by
the agency – yet challenged by the Senate. Brennan refused to budge
and buy into the panel’s claims that many more detainees
endured
the simulated drowning tactic.
“Based
on everything I see, that I read, it indicated that there were three
individuals that were subjected to that. And I can only tell you what
I’m aware of, what I have read, and the data I’ve observed.”
Although
only holding a deputy rank at the time of 9/11, Brennan said Thursday
that he was indeed aware of some of the torture tactics used against
CIA detainees at the time.
This is pure fascism run rampant. " "Mr. Obama could pardon George J. Tenet for authorizing torture at the C.I.A.’s black sites overseas, Donald H. Rumsfeld for authorizing the use of torture at the Guantánamo Bay prison, David S. Addington, John C. Yoo and Jay S. Bybee for crafting the legal cover for torture, and George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for overseeing it all. " Murderers pardoning murders.
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