Posts Tagged ‘CIA’

Obama Whitewashes Bush Torture Regime

In yet another confirmation that the Obama administration’s handling of counterterrorism policy is nothing but a continuation and, in fact, reinforcement of Bush-era policies, the US Department of Justice decided on Thursday that all cases against (former) low-level CIA and military employees suspected of having employed torture, sometimes leading to murder, are to be dropped, except two.

So there’s not gonna be any accountability for the breaches of human rights and the Geneva Conventions conducted under the last administration in the name of the ‘War on Terror’.

Back in August 2009, the Obama White House already decided that there would be no torture investigations regarding former administration officials (Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld) and government lawyers (John Yoo, Jay Bybee) who invented and implemented the ‘legal’ architecture for things like indefinite detention, military commissions and ‘enhanced interrogation methods’ (torture), which eventually spread from Guantánamo Bay and the secret ‘black sites’ to Abu Ghraib and Afghanistan. Neither would there be investigations regarding CIA and military employees who stayed ‘within the lines’ of the new torture regime (even though a lot of people, including JAG lawyers, protested at that time).

The only exception to this immunity granted by Obama would be for those employees who went beyond even what was permitted by the Bush administration in terms of torture. And of those 101 cases, all are now dropped except two.

Those two cases are the most gruesome imaginable: one is of a detainee who froze to death in an American secret prison in 2002 after being stripped and chained to the floor, and the other is of the Abu Ghraib detainee who was photographed in 2003 with a guard holding her thumbs up. All other horrors perpetrated under the Bush administration will now be fully, legally protected.

Change we can believe in. And what’s more: except for one executive order ordering a halt to ’enhanced interrogation methods’, there’s nothing that can prevent a future president from starting to employ torture again…

Glenn Greenwald:

Consider what’s being permanently shielded from legal accountability.  The Bush torture regime extended to numerous prisons around the world, in which tens of thousands of mostly Muslim men were indefinitely imprisoned without a whiff of due process, and included a network of secret prisons – ”black sites” — purposely placed beyond the monitoring reach of even international human rights groups, such as the International Red Cross. 

Over 100 detainees died during U.S. interrogations, dozens due directly to interrogation abuse.  Gen. Barry McCaffrey said: ”We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.”  Maj. Gen. Antonio Taguba, who oversaw the official investigation into detainee abuse, wrote:  ”there is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes. The only question that remains to be answered is whether those who ordered the use of torture will be held to account.”

Thanks to the Obama DOJ, that is no longer in question.  The answer is resoundingly clear: American war criminals, responsible for some of the most shameful and inexcusable crimes in the nation’s history — the systematic, deliberate legalization of a worldwide torture regime — will be fully immunized for those crimes.  And, of course, the Obama administration has spent years just as aggressively shielding those war criminals from all other forms of accountability beyond the criminal realm: invoking secrecy and immunity doctrines to prevent their victims from imposing civil liability, exploiting their party’s control of Congress to suppress formal inquiries, and pressuring and coercing other nations not to investigate their own citizens’ torture at American hands. 

All of those efforts, culminating in yesterday’s entirely unsurprising announcement, means that the U.S. Government has effectively shielded itself from even minimal accountability for its vast torture crimes of the last decade.  Without a doubt, that will be one of the most significant, enduring and consequential legacies of the Obama presidency.

Adam Serwer:

As Glenn Greenwald notes, the Obama administration has blocked all attempts by detainees to sue torture facilitators with its generous use of the state secrets doctrine.

What that means is that the only thing preventing a future Republican president from using torture techniques is a flimsy, reversible executive order from the president himself, because no court has ever made a determination that the interrogation techniques themselves were illegal. Both the new Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, and the new CIA chief David Petraeus, both once among the most prominent opponents of torture, have now expressed support for the idea of using coercive interrogations in “limited” circumstances. Torture became an issue of partisan dispute because Republicans rallied to the defense of their former president. What happens if the same thing happens with Obama supporters, and they feel the need to minimize the magnitude of what happened under Bush in order to defend the lack of accountability sought by their president?

The fact that so few people, if any, will face professional, civil or criminal sanction for torture bothers me far less than the possibility of torture itself becoming American policy again. Between the absence of strong legal barriers to torture and the deterrent factor of criminal or civil accountability, that outcome seems quite possible.

Tags: "War" on Terror, Abu Ghraib, accountability, Afghanistan, Bagram, Bagram Air Base, Bush-Cheney administration, Cheney, CIA, counterterrorism, death, Department of Justice, detainees, Donald Rumsfeld, enhanced interrogation techniques, Eric Holder, Geneva Conventions, George W. Bush, Guantánamo Bay, human rights, immunity, indefinite detention, investigation, Iraq, Iraq War, Jay Bybee, John Yoo, military commissions, murder, Obama, prosecution, torture, U.S. military, waterboarding
Category U.S. politics |

Omar Suleiman, Vice President Of Torturing

Ok, let’s not forget what kind of a happy guy Omar Suleiman, former chief of intelligence and now vice president of Egypt, actually is.

Stephen J. Smith at Reason:

Despite his highly publicized meetings with opposition groups, the limited concessions and promises of future liberalization are not promising. Suleiman’s torturous ways have apparently not let up, with his dreaded Mukhabarat running makeshift torture chambers across Cairo, according to two New York Times reporters who witnessed one firsthand. When the opposition Wafd Party asked Suleiman if he was considering lifting the decades-old state of emergency, which allows the government to arrest and detain with impugnity, the longtime intelligence chief responded incredulously, “At a time like this?”

Glenn Greenwald at Salon:

Suleiman’s repression and brutality — on behalf of both the U.S. and Mubarak — has been well-documented elsewhere (The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer was the first to flag it after the Egyptian uprising, while ABC News recounted how he once offered to chop off the arm of a Terrorist suspect to please the CIA … [Tuesday]‘s Times article does a decent job of conveying how unwilling Suleiman is to bring about anything resembling a real transition to democracy, how indifferent (if not supportive) the Obama administration seems to be about that unwillingness, and how dangerously that conduct is fueling anti-American sentiment among the protesters.  But the fact that American policy has “changed” from imposing Mubarak on that country to imposing someone with Suleiman’s vile history and character belongs at the forefront of every discussion, especially ones purporting to examine who he is.

Tags: Cairo, CIA, Egypt, Omar Suleiman, torture
Category politics |

The Rise And Fall Of Acid

The Beyond Within is a two-part BBC documentary from 1986 about the history of lsd. It’s pretty even-handed and impartial, and features such luminaries as Albert Hoffmann – the Swiss inventor of lsd -, Aldous Huxley -, writer of The Doors of Perception -, Ken Kesey – author of One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest and founder of the Merry Pranksters, the original West Coast hippies – and a British politician named Christopher Mayhew.

The main question the documentary asks is whether the experiences of lsd users can make claim to being spiritual in nature, or whether this is ‘just’ psychedelic delusion. It then documents the history of lsd, from the CIA experiments in the 1950s, to the psychedelic experiments by Timothy Leary at Harvard University and its experimentalist use by Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters in the early 1960s, to its more widespread use as a recreational drug in the age of the hippie counterculture.

Very interesting is the footage of Christopher Mayhew, a British upper class aristocrat politician, who in the early 1960s took mescaline as an experiment to be documented by the BBC:

The footage of his experience is extraordinary, as this eloquent upper-class Mr. Cholmondley-Warner-style aristocrat describes what he is experiencing under the influence of the drug, his eyes wide as saucers. Indeed, the footage proved too controversial for the BBC at the time, and was not shown until this Everyman documentary broadcast it in the 1980′s. Interestingly, Mayhew, who in 1986 was a member of the House of Lords, watches the footage, 30 years later, and stands by his description of the experience. “I had an experience in time” he says, and his conviction is apparent.

But, the documentary also explores bad trips. Albert Hoffmann has the last words, ending on the note that while he didn’t believe his lsd experiences to be spiritual, he did believe that they represented ‘another dimension to reality’.

So here it is. Enjoy!

- Edit: If you’re interested in this stuff and want to read more about it, we can recommend you a couple of titles. Jay Steven’s Storming Heaven. LSD and the American Dream (1998) is a good one. Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, about Kesey and the Pranksters, is one of Adriejan’s favorite books. For the Netherlands’ story of lsd, Maartenp recommends Peter ten Hoopen’s underrated King Acid - which is very hard to come by in paper, but is now available on Kindle.

Tags: 1960s, Albert Hoffmann, Aldous Huxley, BBC, Christopher Mayhew, CIA, counterculture, documentary, hippies, Ken Kesey, lsd, Merry Pranksters, mescaline, Sandoz, The Beyond Within, Timothy Leary
Category books, history, psychedelics, science, spirituality |

WikiLeaks: Eye-Opening Insights Into The War On Terror Behind The Scenes

WikiLeaks is a gift that keeps on giving. Just by accident – I was looking for a document that revealed that the Netherlands, together with Germany and Italy, proposed to remove American nuclear weapons from its soil – I stumbled on this report of a meeting between John Bellinger (above), legal advisor of then-State Secretary Condoleezza Rice, and a couple of important European counterterrorism figures, back in 2006. These include John Cooper, Director-General for Common Foreign and Security Policy at the EU Council Secretariat, and Gijs de Vries, EU Coordinator for the Fight against Terrorism.

The report reveals nothing new, but it does provide a great summary of the legal (or quasi-legal) architecture of the Bush-Cheney War on Terror. On the meeting, Bellinger tries to explain this legal architecture – why suspected terrorists can be held indefinitely at Guantánamo, how extraordinary renditions can be justified, why the Geneva Conventions don’t apply – and tries to convince his European counterparts of their appropriateness. I was very relieved when reading the reactions of the Europeans at the table: very critical, and not very convinced at all.

So if you’re interested in how the Bush administration, rather candidly I must say, defended its treatment of terrorism suspects abroad, and how well it fared in this case in Europe, read on.

Here’s the summary:

Secstate Legal Adviser John Bellinger met with a comprehensive array of EU interlocutors in Brussels on  February 7-8 to discuss U.S. views on the legal framework for the war on terrorism. He stressed that U.S. decisions on how to deal with an unprecedented global terrorist threat had been made after serious consideration of all legal and political options, and that European officials must publicly underline U.S. EU solidarity in the fight against terror. On Guantanamo detainees and Al Qaeda, Bellinger argued that the U.S. was and is acting in the context of a new form of international armed conflict, and that therefore, while the Geneva Conventions do not fit this new situation well, the rules of war provide a more appropriate framework than domestic criminal law. He discussed European concerns about the treatment of detainees. Bellinger also argued that rendition is a vital tool against terror. Finally, he urged the EU not to support a Cuban resolution at the UN Human Rights Commission on Guantanamo. The EU response to the visit was for the most part extremely positive, with the Legal Adviser of the Austrian EU presidency underlining that ”the fight against terror is our (shared) struggle.” Europeans, however, remain concerned about protection issues.

Note how the Bush-Cheney administration reasoned in terms of a “new paradigm”: the idea that the War on Terror is not a metaphorical construct, but an actual war, an international armed conflict, to which the rules of war apply. Yet, the rules of war according to Bush-Cheney only apply selectively, to the extent that the U.S. President deems fit. The Geneva Conventions and the Torture Convention, after all, to them do not apply to terror suspects.

Here we see more of this:

Bellinger stressed that the situation in which the U.S. and its allies find themselves is unprecedented –faced with thousands of Al Qaeda and associated terrorists around the globe whose goal is to inflict mass casualties on innocent civilians by any means possible. The legal frameworks that are readily available, the Geneva Conventions or domestic criminal law, do not fit this unprecedented situation well.

(…)

The U.S. believes that the continuing struggle against Al Qaeda remains a legal state of international armed conflict.

(…)

Al Qaeda is not the same as domestic European terrorist groups like the IRA or RAF because it is global and operates outside the U.S. and across borders. It is in effect a new manifestation on the battlefield, that of “armies of terrorists.” Conceptually, this is a military conflict, not a police action to round up criminals.

Yet even though this is apparently an international armed conflict, the Geneva Conventions to the U.S. do not apply. Al Qaeda is not a ‘High Contracting Party’ to the Conventions, they are not soldiers wearing uniforms, and neither are they ‘protected persons’ (civilians caught up in a conflict). So what are they then?

If not covered as POWs or protected persons, what, then, is the status of Al Qaeda and Taliban combatants? (…) [They] are best defined as unlawful combatants who do not have a right to any protections under the Geneva Conventions.

And this, then, is a new category of people that can be held indefinitely, have no right to a hearing in court, and can be tortured and extradited at will. Of course the Bush-Cheney administration and Mr. Bellinger ignored completely that large parts of the Geneva Conventions, and the Torture Convention, are simply common law – they apply regardless of the state of conflict or the participants in it. Each person in the world is free from being detained indefinitely without recourse to a legal court, and free from torture.

Yet the Americans apply international law only selectively, to the extent to which “military necessity” allows it. And what military necessity is, is of course to the unreviewable discretion of the U.S. President. This is the war paradigm reasoning again.

Accordingly, to clarify U.S. policy towards detainees President Bush issued a public directive on February 7, 2002, titled “Humane Treatment of Al Qaeda and Taliban Detainees.” This directive orders that all detainees under the control of the Armed Forces be treated humanely and, to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity, consistent with the Geneva Conventions. In addition, the U.S. remains bound by, and committed to, the  United Nations Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment. This includes Article 4, which prohibits torture, and Article 3, which prohibits transfers of persons to countries where there is substantial likelihood that they will be tortured. Article 3 is applied on a case-by-case basis.

Bellinger however does address the obvious question: if detainees can be held for the duration of the “war”, and if the War on Terror is only over when America declares it over (which willl, probably, never occur), does that mean that people can be held forever? Why, yes, they can:

Can detainees be held indefinitely? What if some are innocent? The U.S. recognizes that these are troubling questions, but does not believe such questions could justify a decision not to detain people who represent a danger to American citizens. To deal with this problem at Guantanamo, the U.S. has created an annual Administrative Review Board process to determine, for each individual detainee, whether that detainee should still be considered as in a state of war with the U.S.

(…)

The question has also been raised as to the possible innocence of Guantanamo detainees. As the Geneva  Conventions dictate, if there is any doubt about whether or not an individual is a POW, there must be an Article 5 tribunal. Since Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters clearly did not meet the conditions necessary to be granted POW status, the President decided that Article 5 tribunals were not necessary.

So, in a twisted rendering of the language of international law, individuals can be determined to be “in a state of war” with the U.S., whereas status determination tribunals for terror suspects need not be established, as there is no doubt as to their status: they are terrorists.

Bellinger than goes on to the address the European concern that people have been snatched from the street by the CIA, and transported to Guantánamo, or secret “black sites” that we don’t even know about. Although it has by now been confirmed that people (and sometimes innocent people) have been abducted by the CIA, back in 2006 it could still be denied. He also chooses not to go into CIA flights:

Bellinger sought to dispel allegations that hundreds of people had been kidnapped from European streets. He pointed out that there is no evidence for such allegations, and that the United States respects the sovereignty of European governments. On renditions, CIA flights, and other intelligence operations, the U.S. will not confirm or deny specific allegations, in order not to compromise the confidentiality of intelligence operations as such.

After that, Bellinger tries to bully the Europeans into not supporting a motion by Cuba against American actions at Guantánamo in the U.N. Human Rights Commission:

Some EU interlocutors expressed concern that some EU member states would support a Cuban resolution against U.S. actions in Guantanamo at the upcoming UN Human Rights Commission, that might be modeled after a European Parliament resolution on the subject. Bellinger warned that European support for a Guanatanamo resolution would be a serious setback to U.S.-EU cooperation against terrorism, and give the unacceptable impression that the EU was aligned with Cuba against the U.S.

Soo… Having come at the end of his expose, how did the Europeans at the table react?

Although Bellinger tries to cover it up in diplomatic language, and calls the paragraph “European Reactions Positive for U.S.”, I’d say it’s pretty clear that they were critical and not convinced. Which, by the way, creates the question why Bellinger would report that European reactions were positive. Maybe to make himself look good back home?

By and large, Bellinger’s European interlocutors responded very positively to his visit. Their questions were many and varied, and all of the meetings were marked by vigorous but constructive discussion. It is clear that many Europeans continue to believe that Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions can be applied to enemy combatants, and still afford the United States the flexibility it seeks. It is also apparent that lingering concerns (fed by negative public perceptions) remain about the treatment of detainees, and protection against wrongful detentions. Some governments remain focused on renditions, and the possibility that there will be negative revelations that impact on them directly.

That said, the visit was very helpful in beginning to dispel European misunderstandings and misgivings about our pursuit of the war on terror. Continued engagement on these issues is critical in the coming months to persuade EU governments to stand more firmly and publicly in the face of their public’s concerns and suspicion regarding Guantanamo, renditions, and the legality of U.S. actions against Al Qaeda. The Austrian Chair of the COJUR meeting, Ferdinand Trauttmansdorf, concluded the meeting with the following message: “We leave this discussion with the notion that America is carefully considering these difficult questions in good faith.” He said also that the fight against terror was  a burden shared by the EU, and that the U.S. has as much of a right to ask questions of the EU, as the EU does of the U.S.
On the upcoming Human Rights Commission, urgent consultations with the EU will be necessary to avert the possibility of EU support for a Cuban Guantanamo resolution.

Note the quasi-objective and kinda manipulative tone that seems to be common to confidential diplomatic memos (we saw it earlier in the secret CIA document on the manipulation of European public opinion on the war in Afghanistan). Lingering concerns are “fed by negative public perceptions”. The meeting was helpful in beginning to “dispel” European “misunderstandings” and “misgivings” about the war on terror. “Continued engagement” by the U.S. is necessary to push European governments in line vis-a-vis their publics critical of Guantánamo Bay and illegal CIA flights.

Finally, I found it very interesting that the U.S. administration was so worried that the EU would support a Cuban resolution in the U.N. on Guantánamo Bay. Does anyone know how that played out?

In conclusion, what do we learn from scrutiny of this document? Well, as I said, nothing really new. It only confirms again the extent to which the Bush-Cheney administration reasoned from a “war paradigm”: the idea that the fight against Al Qaeda is a new kind of actual international armed conflict, to which the rules of war however only apply limitedly. This reasoning allows them to treat terror suspects in utter disregard of international law. Moreover, since an end to the ”War” on Terror is not in sight, since it is not limited to boundaries, and since it is ultimately to the President’s unreviewable discretion whether military necessity exists, this makes the U.S. kind of a universal imperial policeman, with nothing that can be put in its way. Is that clear-cut authoritarianism? I’d say it is. Happily, at least also behind the scenes, some people stood up.

And thank God for WikiLeaks.

Tags: "War" on Terror, Cablegate, CIA, counterterrorism, Dick Cheney, diplomacy, European Union, extraordinary renditions, Geneva Conventions, George W. Bush, Guantánamo Bay, human rights, indefinite detention, international law, John Bellinger, torture, UN Convention Against Torture, WikiLeaks
Category Europe, politics, terrorism, U.S. politics |

US Runs Secret Intelligence Campaign Directed Against United Nations

This really boggles me. Revealed by the publication by WikiLeaks of a quarter millon classified diplomatic cables from American embassies, is a massive secret intelligence campaign directed by the U.S. government against the leadership of the United Nations.

This included the gathering of personal details, biometric information (fingerprints and iris scans), passwords, credit card numbers, use of private networks and frequent flyer accounts of the secretary general, permanent Security Council representatives, undersecretaries, heads of agencies, chief advisers, heads of peacekeeping operations and other key top UN personnel.

While of course in the dark side of international relations such a thing shouldn’t surprise anyone, I’m still amazed at the grandiosity of this scheme.

The Guardian:

Washington is running a secret intelligence campaign targeted at the leadership of the United Nations, including the secretary general, Ban Ki-moon and the permanent security council representatives from China, Russia, France and the UK.

A classified directive which appears to blur the line between diplomacy and spying was issued to US diplomats under Hillary Clinton’s name in July 2009, demanding forensic technical details about the communications systems used by top UN officials, including passwords and personal encryption keys used in private and commercial networks for official communications.

It called for detailed biometric information “on key UN officials, to include undersecretaries, heads of specialised agencies and their chief advisers, top SYG [secretary general] aides, heads of peace operations and political field missions, including force commanders” as well as intelligence on Ban’s “management and decision-making style and his influence on the secretariat”. A parallel intelligence directive sent to diplomats in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Uganda, Rwanda and Burundi said biometric data included DNA, fingerprints and iris scans.

Washington also wanted credit card numbers, email addresses, phone, fax and pager numbers and even frequent-flyer account numbers for UN figures and “biographic and biometric information on UN Security Council permanent representatives”.

The secret “national human intelligence collection directive” was sent to US missions at the UN in New York, Vienna and Rome; 33 embassies and consulates, including those in London, Paris and Moscow.

The operation targetted at the UN appears to have involved all of Washington’s main intelligence agencies. The CIA’s clandestine service, the US Secret Service and the FBI were included in the “reporting and collection needs” cable alongside the state department under the heading “collection requirements and tasking”.

The leak of the directive is likely to spark questions about the legality of the operation and about whether state department diplomats are expected to spy. The level of technical and personal detail demanded about the UN top team’s communication systems could be seen as laying the groundwork for surveillance or hacking operations. It requested “current technical specifications, physical layout and planned upgrades to telecommunications infrastructure and information systems, networks and technologies used by top officials and their support staff”, as well as details on private networks used for official comunication, “to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys and virtual private network versions used”.

The UN has previously asserted that bugging the secretary general is illegal, citing the 1946 UN convention on priveleges and immunities which states: “The premises of the United Nations shall be inviolable. The property and assets of the United Nations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, requisition, confiscation, expropriation and any other form of interference, whether by executive, administrative, judicial or legislative action”.

The 1961 Vienna convention on diplomatic relations, which covers the UN, also states that “the official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable”.

The emergence of the directive also risks undermining political trust between the UN leadership and the US, which is the former’s biggest paying member, supplying almost a quarter of its budget – more than $3bn (£1.9bn) this year.

Washington wanted intelligence on the contentious issue of the “relationship or funding between UN personnel and/or missions and terrorist organisations” and links between the UN Relief and Works Agency in the Middle East, and Hamas and Hezbollah. It also wanted to know about plans by UN special rapporteurs to press for potentially embarrassing investigations into the US treatment of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay, and “details of friction” between the agencies co-ordinating UN humanitarian operations, evidence of corruption inside UNAids, the joint UN programme on HIV, and in international health organisations, including the World Health Organisation (WHO). It even called for “biographic and biometric” information on Dr Margaret Chan, the director general of WHO, as well as details of her personality, role, effectiveness, management style and influence.

Tags: Ban Ki-Moon, biometrics, Cablegate, CIA, classified diplomatic cables, cyberwarfare, diplomacy, international relations, Secret Service, Security Council, United Nations, WHO, WikiLeaks
Category politics, U.S. politics |

The Shadow War On Terrorism

The New York Times has a sweeping and revealing article about the “shadow war on terrorism” the United States, under the leadership of Barack Obama, are waging. While everyone knows that drone raids are a frequent occurrence in Pakistan, and that missile attacks have been undertaken in Yemen, the sheer size of the global operations of the U.S. conducted by the Pentagon and the CIA against Al Qaeda is news. It ranges from the employment of unmanned drones and missiles to spy and commando teams, as well as the contracting of private soldiers; and the playing field is not only Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, but also Kenya, North Africa and central Asia. What is interesting is that this is a counterterrorism policy that is explicitly owned by Obama; although the Bush administration of course also conducted operations like these, they have grown in scope and intensity in the past one and a half years.

Analytically, I think the article makes an interesting point by pitching Obama’s shadow war against the Bush administration’s invasion and occupation of entire countries. The rationale behind the Afghanistan war, of course, was the idea that the U.S. needs to have military control over a geographical area in order to prevent terrorists from attacking American soil; an idea that then almost necessarily leads to the nation building concept, and has gotten the West into a protracted, absurdly expensive war to which no end is in sight, and which has done much to discredit its image in the Muslim world. The disadvantages of the neoconservative view on counterterrorism should after nine years be pretty obvious.

On the other hand, a massive clandestine “shadow war” has its own negativities as well. The most important one is that it makes civilian casualties, just like invading countries does. In Yemen, for example, a December 2009 attack against an Al Qaeda camp with a cruise missile loaded with cluster bombs is said to have killed more than 50 civilians. Aside from the obvious and inexcusable human tragedy such “covert actions” incur, one should easily be able to grasp how this affects Middle Eastern’s populations’ viewpoints of America, and the West. Secondly, the problem is you sometimes have to rely on local leaders whose bona fides can be questioned as well. Thirdly, a shadow war like this is essentially shadowy: this means, first, that the boundaries of international law between soldiers, spies and civilians become blurred (with consequences for the applicability of, for example, the Geneva Conventions) and secondly, that Congressional and judicial oversight on covert operations and military attacks is weakened, opening up the prospective of an uncontrolled Executive and military operating throughout the world. In the case of Anwar Aulaqi, a Yemeni Al Qaeda leader who also has the American nationality, the grave yet hardly-reported-on situation presents itself that the President here orders the execution through military means of an American citizen… Finally, the risks of contracting private fighters, like a weaking of accountability and control, are clear.

What I also thought interesting was the transformation of the CIA from an intelligence agency into what is almost a paramilitary organization. But read the article, it’s probably the most comprehensive overview of the “war on terror” as conducted today that is now available.

The New York Times:

In roughly a dozen countries — from the deserts of North Africa, to the mountains of Pakistan, to former Soviet republics crippled by ethnic and religious strife — the United States has significantly increased military and intelligence operations, pursuing the enemy using robotic drones and commando teams, paying contractors to spy and training local operatives to chase terrorists.

The White House has intensified the Central Intelligence Agency’s drone missile campaign in Pakistan, approved raids against Qaeda operatives in Somalia and launched clandestine operations from Kenya. The administration has worked with European allies to dismantle terrorist groups in North Africa, efforts that include a recent French strike in Algeria. And the Pentagon tapped a network of private contractors to gather intelligence about things like militant hide-outs in Pakistan and the location of an American soldier currently in Taliban hands.

While the stealth war began in the Bush administration, it has expanded under President Obama, who rose to prominence in part for his early opposition to the invasion of Iraq. Virtually none of the newly aggressive steps undertaken by the United States government have been publicly acknowledged. In contrast with the troop buildup in Afghanistan, which came after months of robust debate, for example, the American military campaign in Yemen began without notice in December and has never been officially confirmed.

Obama administration officials point to the benefits of bringing the fight against Al Qaeda and other militants into the shadows. Afghanistan and Iraq, they said, have sobered American politicians and voters about the staggering costs of big wars that topple governments, require years of occupation and can be a catalyst for further radicalization throughout the Muslim world.

(…)

Yet such wars come with many risks: the potential for botched operations that fuel anti-American rage; a blurring of the lines between soldiers and spies that could put troops at risk of being denied Geneva Convention protections; a weakening of the Congressional oversight system put in place to prevent abuses by America’s secret operatives; and a reliance on authoritarian foreign leaders and surrogates with sometimes murky loyalties.

(…)

The administration’s demands have accelerated a transformation of the C.I.A. into a paramilitary organization as much as a spying agency, which some critics worry could lower the threshold for future quasi-military operations. In Pakistan’s mountains, the agency had broadened its drone campaign beyond selective strikes against Qaeda leaders and now regularly obliterates suspected enemy compounds and logistics convoys, just as the military would grind down an enemy force.

For its part, the Pentagon is becoming more like the C.I.A. Across the Middle East and elsewhere, Special Operations troops under secret “Execute Orders” have conducted spying missions that were once the preserve of civilian intelligence agencies. With code names like Eager Pawn and Indigo Spade, such programs typically operate with even less transparency and Congressional oversight than traditional covert actions by the C.I.A.

And, as American counterterrorism operations spread beyond war zones into territory hostile to the military, private contractors have taken on a prominent role, raising concerns that the United States has outsourced some of its most important missions to a sometimes unaccountable private army.

Read more.

Tags: "War" on Terror, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Anwar Aulaqi, Central Asia, CIA, counterterrorism, North Africa, Obama, Pakistan, Pentagon, shadow war, The New York Times, U.S. Army, Yemen
Category terrorism, U.S. politics |

WIKILEAKS PUBLISHES THOUSANDS OF CLASSIFIED MILITARY REPORTS ON WAR IN AFGHANISTAN

The whistleblowers’ website WikiLeaks has put 92,000 classified military reports on the war in Afghanistan online. This is the site that earlier this year published a classified CIA document on the manipulation of public opinion in Western Europe, and a video showing the shooting of innocents from an Apache helicopter in Iraq.

The publishing of these classified reports, covering a period from January 2004 to December 2009, constitutes one of the biggest leaks in US military history. According to The Guardian, however, most of the material is no longer militarily sensitive.

Beforehand, the New York Times, The Guardian and Der Spiegel were given insight in the documents, and the websites of all three papers are now extensively reporting on them. According to the NYT, the reports show that the war in Afghanistan is going even worse than what is known from the official picture. The Taliban use heat-seeking missiles like they did in the 1980s, the Afghan army and police are not cooperating, and Pakistani intelligence and military are untrustworthy. There appear to be more secret ops than was known, and drone strikes seem to be pretty ineffective at times.

The Guardian puts the spotlight on the number of civilian casualties, that is way higher than was known, the increasing rate of Taliban attacks on NATO targets, and the support to the insurgence given by Iran and Pakistan. Here again, the conclusion is that the situation in Afghanistan is much worse than suspected. And that Obama’s surge is possibly failing.

See the NYT’s ”war logs” reporting here, and The Guardian’s interactive “war logs” here. Both have a lot of articles.

Here’s the leader of the NYT:

A six-year archive of classified military documents made public on Sunday offers an unvarnished, ground-level picture of the war in Afghanistan that is in many respects more grim than the official portrayal.

The secret documents, released on the Internet by an organization called WikiLeaks, are a daily diary of an American-led force often starved for resources and attention as it struggled against an insurgency that grew larger, better coordinated and more deadly each year.

The New York Times, the British newspaper The Guardian and the German magazine Der Spiegel were given access to the voluminous records several weeks ago on the condition that they not report on the material before Sunday.

The documents — some 92,000 reports spanning parts of two administrations from January 2004 through December 2009 — illustrate in mosaic detail why, after the United States has spent almost $300 billion on the war in Afghanistan, the Taliban are stronger than at any time since 2001.

As the new American commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David H. Petraeus, tries to reverse the lagging war effort, the documents sketch a war hamstrung by an Afghan government, police force and army of questionable loyalty and competence, and by a Pakistani military that appears at best uncooperative and at worst to work from the shadows as an unspoken ally of the very insurgent forces the American-led coalition is trying to defeat.

The material comes to light as Congress and the public grow increasingly skeptical of the deepening involvement in Afghanistan and its chances for success as next year’s deadline to begin withdrawing troops looms.

(…)

The reports — usually spare summaries but sometimes detailed narratives — shed light on some elements of the war that have been largely hidden from the public eye:

• The Taliban have used portable heat-seeking missiles against allied aircraft, a fact that has not been publicly disclosed by the military. This type of weapon helped the Afghan mujahedeen defeat the Soviet occupation in the 1980s.

• Secret commando units like Task Force 373 — a classified group of Army and Navy special operatives — work from a “capture/kill list” of about 70 top insurgent commanders. These missions, which have been stepped up under the Obama administration, claim notable successes, but have sometimes gone wrong, killing civilians and stoking Afghan resentment.

• The military employs more and more drone aircraft to survey the battlefield and strike targets in Afghanistan, although their performance is less impressive than officially portrayed. Some crash or collide, forcing American troops to undertake risky retrieval missions before the Taliban can claim the drone’s weaponry.

• The Central Intelligence Agency has expanded paramilitary operations inside Afghanistan. The units launch ambushes, order airstrikes and conduct night raids. From 2001 to 2008, the C.I.A. paid the budget of Afghanistan’s spy agency and ran it as a virtual subsidiary.

And here’s The Guardian:

A huge cache of secret US military files today provides a devastating portrait of the failing war in Afghanistan, revealing how coalition forces have killed hundreds of civilians in unreported incidents, Taliban attacks have soared and Nato commanders fear neighbouring Pakistan and Iran are fuelling the insurgency.

The disclosures come from more than 90,000 records of incidents and intelligence reports about the conflict obtained by the whistleblowers’ website Wikileaks in one of the biggest leaks in US military history. The files, which were made available to the Guardian, the New York Times and the German weekly Der Spiegel, give a blow-by-blow account of the fighting over the last six years, which has so far cost the lives of more than 320 British and over 1,000 US troops.

Their publication comes amid mounting concern that Barack Obama’s “surge” strategy is failing and as coalition troops hunt for two US navy sailors captured by the Taliban south of Kabul on Friday.

The war logs also detail:

• How a secret “black” unit of special forces hunts down Taliban leaders for “kill or capture” without trial.

• How the US covered up evidence that the Taliban have acquired deadly surface-to-air missiles.

• How the coalition is increasingly using deadly Reaper drones to hunt and kill Taliban targets by remote control from a base in Nevada.

• How the Taliban have caused growing carnage with a massive escalation of its roadside bombing campaign, which has killed more than 2,000 civilians to date.

Tags: Afghanistan, CIA, classified military documents, drones, NATO, Taliban, The Guardian, The New York Times, US military, WikiLeaks
Category terrorism, U.S. politics |

Geheim CIA-rapport laat manipulatie West-Europese publieke opinie zien

[Dutch re-post of original English post earlier today]

Van Glenn Greenwald, een geheim CIA-rapport (pdf) dat eerder deze maand opgesteld werd, en gelekt is via de klokkenluiderswebsite WikiLeaks. Wat erin staat is fascinerend. Het is opgesteld door de ‘Red Cell’ (een soort afdeling binnen de CIA die ‘onconventionele’ oplossingen verzint), en laat zien hoe de Verenigde Staten na de val van de Nederlandse regering de publieke opinie in Duitsland en Frankrijk kunnen manipuleren teneinde steun voor de oorlog in Afghanistan te doen toenemen.

Dit is niet alleen één van de meest cynische stukken die ik ooit gelezen heb; het plaatst de controverse in Nederland over verlenging van de missie in Afghanistan ook in een heel ander perspectief.

Het CIA-rapport analyseert eerst hoe de Duitse en Franse regeringen hebben gesteund op de “publieke apathie” (letterlijk) teneinde “kiezers te negeren” (ook letterlijk) en geleidelijk aan troepenaantallen in Afghanistan te verhogen:

Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters

The Afghanistans mission’s low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF).

Als nieuwe gevechten aanstaande lente en zomer meer militaire en burgerlijke slachtoffers zullen eisen, en als een “Nederlands debat” overspringt naar deze landen, zou de publieke opinie zich echter tegen de oorlog kunnen keren. Dit zou Duitse en Franse politici kunnen doen terugdeizen. Daarom is het belangrijk, aldus het rapport, dat de Duitse en Franse kiezers “duidelijke overeenkomsten tussen resultaten in Afghanistan en hun eigen prioriteiten zien”.

En wat zijn deze prioriteiten? Volgens de CIA zijn de Fransen vooral gefocust op ”burgers en vluchtelingen”, en de Duitsers op de “kosten en redenen” van de oorlog. Op deze zorgen zou men zich daarom moeten richten, door middel van het aanpassen van de boodschap. Zo moeten de gevolgen voor de Afghaanse bevolking “gedramatiseerd” worden om bij de Europeanen “schuldgevoelens” teweeg te brengen.

Focusing on a message that ISAF benefits Afghan civilians and citing examples of concrete gains could limit and perhaps even reverse opposition to the mission. Such tailored messages could tap into acute French concern for civilians and refugees.

(…)

Conversely, messaging that dramatizes the potential adverse consequences of an ISAF defeat for Afghan civilians could leverage French (and other European) guilt for abandoning them.

(…)

Some German opposition to ISAF might be muted by proof of progress on the ground, warnings about the potential consequences for Germany of defeat, and reassurances that Germany is a valued partner in a necessary NATO-led mission.

Omdat Europeanen verliefd zijn op Obama adviseert het rapport ook dat deze persoonlijk hun belang voor de NAVO-inspanningen in Afghanistan benadrukt. En mochten ze zich terugtrekken, dan zou Obama expliciet zijn teleurstelling moeten aangeven.

The confidence of the French and German publics in President Obama’s ability to handle foreign affairs in general and Afghanistan in particular suggest that they would be receptive to his direct affirmation of their importance to the ISAF mission – and sensitive to direct expressions of disappointment in allies who do not help.

En nu komt wellicht het beste stuk. Volgens het rapport zijn de vrouwen van Afghanistan de beste boodschappers om een menselijk gezicht op de missie te plakken. Niet alleen omdat vrouwen in het algemeen persoonlijker kunnen spreken, maar ook omdat ze gebruikt kunnen worden om specifiek op Duitse, Franse en andere West-Europese vrouwen te mikken. De CIA heeft ook suggesties voor publiciteitsacties en een media-offensief.

Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.

(…)

Media events that feature testimonials by Afghan women should probably be most effective if broadcast on programs that have large and disproportionately female audiences.

De website die dit CIA-rapport online heeft gezet, WikiLeaks, is briljant. De laatste paar jaar hebben ze een keur aan geheime documenten, die activiteiten van regeringen en bedrijven aan het licht brengen, te pakken weten te krijgen en gepubliceerd. Zo hebben ze bijvoorbeeld de gevoelige Standard Operating Manual for Guantánamo Bay online gezet, documenten die laten zien hoe aan de economische ineenstorting van IJsland corrupte offshore loans vooraf gingen, de beruchte e-mailuitwisselingen tussen klimaatwetenschappers, documenten die laten zien dat er giftige afvalstoffen geloost worden voor de Afrikaanse kust, enzovoort. Ze zijn nu bezig om een controversiële video uit te brengen met beelden van een Amerikaanse luchtaanval in Afghanisten afgelopen mei, waarbij 97 burgers omkwamen.

Dit alles heeft ze echter een gehaat doelwit gemaakt van overheden en economische elites overal ter wereld. Het Pentagon heeft zelfs een rapport opgesteld, dat eveneens door de site werd ondervangen en gepubliceerd, hoe WikiLeaks aangepakt kan worden. De mogelijkheid wordt hierbij geopperd dat zelfs het surfen naar de site als een misdaad gezien kan worden. Greenwald:

As The New York Times put it last week: “To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.”  In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report — obtained and posted by WikiLeaks — devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled ”Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?”, ways it would seek to destroy the organization.  It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but “even accessing the website itself is a crime,” and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks’ destruction as follows: click

Greenwald heeft op zijn site een interview met Julian Assange, de Australische hoofdredacteur van WikiLeaks, die vertelt dat vrijwilligers van WikiLeaks in toenemende mate worden belaagd door de Amerikaanse en andere autoriteiten. Zo is een van hen vorige week nog gearresteerd en ondervraagd op IJsland. Van hun site:

Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations. In the developing world, these range from the appalling assassination of two related human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March (an armed attack on my compound there in 2007 is still unattributed) to an unsuccessful mass attack by Chinese computers on our servers in Stockholm, after we published photos of murders in Tibet. In the West this has ranged from the overt, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, threatening to prosecute us unless we removed a report on CIA activity in Kosovo, to the covert, to an ambush by a “James Bond” character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere “we think it would be in your interest to…”.

De reden dat de redacteuren van WikiLeaks zich op IJsland bevinden is dat het IJslandse parlement, na de publicatie van een reeks documenten die laten zien hoe aan de economische ineenstorting van het land verschillende malafide praktijken voorafgingen, wetgeving overweegt die aan klokkenluiders de beste bescherming ter wereld zou moeten geven. Dit zou van IJsland een vrijhaven voor journalisten maken.

Om af te sluiten: dit alles draait om open government, geheimhouding, internetvrijheid en uiteindelijk om de mogelijkheid voor burgers om, eenmaal geïnformeerd, inzicht te krijgen in de werking van regeringen en bedrijven, en te proberen ze te hervormen. Het soort informatiemanipulatie waar de CIA zich blijkens bovenstaand rapport aan schuldig maakt zou voor iedereen openbaar moeten zijn, zodat burgers een oordeel kunnen vormen over politieke vraagstukken, en over de regeringen die vorm geven aan deze vraagstukken. Je kunt hier aan WikiLeaks doneren, ze helpen, of een veilige inzending doen.

Tags: Afghaanse vrouwen, Afghanistan, CIA, Duitsland, Frankrijk, geheimhouding, informatiemanipulatie, open government, WikiLeaks
Category Dutch politics, Europe, politics, privacy, terrorism, U.S. politics |

Classified CIA Document On Manipulating Public Opinion In Western Europe

[Er is ook een Nederlandse versie van deze post]

Via Glenn Greenwald, a classified CIA report (pdf) prepared earlier this month that was leaked via the whistleblowers’ website WikiLeaks. What’s in it makes for a fascinating read. Prepared by the ‘Red Cell’ (apparently a unit within the CIA meant for unconventional thinking), it outlines how the United States, in the wake of the fall of the Dutch government, can manipulate public opinion in Germany and France so that support for the war in Afghanistan will rise.

Not only is this one the most cynical documents that I have ever read. It also puts the controversy in the Netherlands about continuation of the mission in Afghanistan in a whole other perspective.

The CIA report analyzes, first, how the German and French governments have relied on “public apathy” (literally) to “ignore voters” (again, literally) and steadily increase troop numbers in Afghanistan:

Public Apathy Enables Leaders to Ignore Voters

The Afghanistans mission’s low public salience has allowed French and German leaders to disregard popular opposition and steadily increase their troop contributions to the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). 

However, if in the spring and summer fighting an upsurge in military and civilian casualties might take place, and if “a Dutch-style debate spills over” into these countries, public opinion might become actively hostile towards the war. This might lead German and French politicians to cringe. Therefore, the report urges, it is important that the German and French publics “perceive clear connections between outcomes in Afghanistan and their own priorities”.

And what are these priorities? According to the CIA, the French are focused on ”civilians and refugees”, while the Germans are concerned with “price and principle” of the war. Therefore, these concerns have to be targeted and the message “tailored” accordingly. Yes, it’s even important to ”dramatize” the consequences for Afghan civilians to tap into Europeans’ feelings of “guilt” for abandoning them.

Focusing on a message that ISAF benefits Afghan civilians and citing examples of concrete gains could limit and perhaps even reverse opposition to the mission. Such tailored messages could tap into acute French concern for civilians and refugees.

(…)

Conversely, messaging that dramatizes the potential adverse consequences of an ISAF defeat for Afghan civilians could leverage French (and other European) guilt for abandoning them.

(…)

Some German opposition to ISAF might be muted by proof of progress on the ground, warnings about the potential consequences for Germany of defeat, and reassurances that Germany is a valued partner in a necessary NATO-led mission.

Now, since Europeans love Obama, it is advised that he personally affirms their importance to the NATO effort in Afghanistan. The other way around, if they withdraw, Obama should show his explicit disappointment.

The confidence of the French and German publics in President Obama’s ability to handle foreign affairs in general and Afghanistan in particular suggest that they would be receptive to his direct affirmation of their importance to the ISAF mission – and sensitive to direct expressions of disappointment in allies who do not help.

And now comes possibly the best part. According to the report, Afghan women are the best messengers for putting a human face on the war in Afghanistan. Not only because women have the ability to speak more personally, but also because they can be used to specifically target German, French and other Western European women to make them support the war. The CIA also has suggestions for outreach iniatives and media events.

Afghan women could serve as ideal messengers in humanizing the ISAF role in combating the Taliban because of women’s ability to speak personally and credibly about their experiences under the Taliban, their aspirations for the future, and their fears of a Taliban victory. Outreach initiatives that create media opportunities for Afghan women to share their stories with French, German, and other European women could help to overcome pervasive skepticism among women in Western Europe toward the ISAF mission.

(…)

Media events that feature testimonials by Afghan women should probably be most effective if broadcast on programs that have large and disproportionately female audiences.

Now, the website that has posted this CIA document, WikiLeaks, is absolutely brilliant. Over the past several years, they have obtained and published a wide array of secret documents, exposing the activities of governments and corporations. For example, they have posted the sensitive Standard Operating Manual for Guantánamo Bay, documents showing how corrupt offshore loans precipitated the economic collapse of Iceland, the famous e-mail exchanges between climate scientists, documents showing toxic dumping before the coast of Africa, and more. They are planning to release a controversial video of a U.S. airstrike in Afghanistan last May that killed 97 civilians.

All this has has made them, however, a hated target for governments and economic elites around the world. The Pentagon even prepared a document, also obtained and published by the site, on how to take WikiLeaks on, including the possibility of making even accessing the website a crime. Greenwald:

As The New York Times put it last week: “To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.”  In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report — obtained and posted by WikiLeaks — devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled ”Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?”, ways it would seek to destroy the organization.  It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but “even accessing the website itself is a crime,” and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks’ destruction as follows: click

Greenwald has an interview with Julian Assange, the Australian editor of WikiLeaks, on his site, who makes clear that WikiLeaks volunteers are increasingly being harassed by U.S. and other authorities. One of them, for example, was arrested and questioned on Iceland only last week. From their site:

Over the last few years, WikiLeaks has been the subject of hostile acts by security organizations. In the developing world, these range from the appalling assassination of two related human rights lawyers in Nairobi last March (an armed attack on my compound there in 2007 is still unattributed) to an unsuccessful mass attack by Chinese computers on our servers in Stockholm, after we published photos of murders in Tibet. In the West this has ranged from the overt, the head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the BND, threatening to prosecute us unless we removed a report on CIA activity in Kosovo, to the covert, to an ambush by a “James Bond” character in a Luxembourg car park, an event that ended with a mere “we think it would be in your interest to…”.

The reason WikiLeaks editors are spending time in Iceland is that the Icelandic Parliament, in the wake of a stream of documents showing various nefarious causes for the country’s economic collapse that had been hidden from the public’s and policy-makers’ view, is considering legislation providing for the best whistleblower protection in the world. This would make Iceland a ‘journalism haven’.

To conclude: this is all about open government, secrecy, internet freedom and ultimately, the power of citizens, when informed, to gain insight into the workings of governments and corporations and attempt to reform them. The kind of information manipulation by the CIA outlined in this document should be open for all to see, and consequently, to make judgments concerning the political questions at hand, and the governments addressing those questions. You can donate to WikiLeaks, assist them, or make a secure submission here.

Tags: Afghan women, Afghanistan, CIA, France, Germany, information manipulation, open government, secrecy, WikiLeaks
Category Dutch politics, Europe, politics, privacy, terrorism, U.S. politics |

CIA liet Frans dorp trippen

 SpitsNieuws:

De CIA heeft in 1951 honderden inwoners van een Frans dorp LSD laten innemen. De Amerikaanse inlichtingendienst had het tripmiddel stiekem in het deeg van de bakker gedaan. Daarmee is er eindelijk een oplossing voor “mysterie van het vervloekte brood”, zoals de inwoners van Pont-Saint-Esprit het incident zijn gaan noemen.

Honderden mensen kregen de LSD binnen en een groot deel van hen moest opgenomen worden in gekkenhuizen. Zo dacht één persoon dat hij kon vliegen. Hij schreeuwde: “Ik ben een vliegtuig!” en sprong vervolgens vanaf de tweede verdieping van zijn huis naar beneden waardoor hij zijn beide benen brak. Anderen dachten dat hun hoofd in gesmolten lood was veranderd of dat er grote rode bloemen uit hun buik groeiden. Vijf mensen vonden de dood. Destijds was het vermoeden dat de bakker tarwe had gebruikt die was besmet met moederkoorn, een schimmel dat aan LSD verwante stoffen bevat.

(…)

Maar onderzoeksjournalist H.P. Albarelli Jr. onthult nu dat de CIA en een inlichtingendienst van het Amerikaanse leger verantwoordelijk waren voor de massa-hallucinatie. De geheime diensten wilden onderzoeken of LSD gebruikt kon worden als wapen. De VS zou zeker nog tot 1965 hebben geëxperimenteerd met de drug. De Amerikanen waren daar niet alleen in. Ook het Britse leger heeft militairen LSD laten gebruiken.

Tags: CIA, lsd
Category history, psychedelics |

The Finer Details Of Waterboarding

For those who still have any doubts about whether the practice of waterboarding constitutes “torture”. Please read these disgusting, horrifying details about what went on in a waterboarding session, taken from internal Justice Department and CIA documents made public some time ago. It also includes details about other forms of torture the CIA employed.

Salon:

Interrogators pumped detainees full of so much water that the CIA turned to a special saline solution to minimize the risk of death, the documents show. The agency used a gurney “specially designed” to tilt backwards at a perfect angle to maximize the water entering the prisoner’s nose and mouth, intensifying the sense of choking – and to be lifted upright quickly in the event that a prisoner stopped breathing.

The documents also lay out, in chilling detail, exactly what should occur in each two-hour waterboarding “session.” Interrogators were instructed to start pouring water right after a detainee exhaled, to ensure he inhaled water, not air, in his next breath. They could use their hands to “dam the runoff” and prevent water from spilling out of a detainee’s mouth. They were allowed six separate 40-second “applications” of liquid in each two-hour session – and could dump water over a detainee’s nose and mouth for a total of 12 minutes a day. Finally, to keep detainees alive even if they inhaled their own vomit during a session – a not-uncommon side effect of waterboarding – the prisoners were kept on a liquid diet. The agency recommended Ensure Plus.

(…)

One of the more interesting revelations in the documents is the use of a saline solution in waterboarding. Why? Because the CIA forced such massive quantities of water into the mouths and noses of detainees, prisoners inevitably swallowed huge amounts of liquid – enough to conceivably kill them from hyponatremia, a rare but deadly condition in which ingesting enormous quantities of water results in a dangerously low concentration of sodium in the blood.

(…)

The CIA used a “specially designed” gurney for waterboarding, Bradbury wrote. After immobilizing a prisoner by strapping him down, interrogators then tilted the gurney to a 10-15 degree downward angle, with the detainee’s head at the lower end. They put a black cloth over his face and poured water, or saline, from a height of 6 to 18 inches, documents show. The slant of the gurney helped drive the water more directly into the prisoner’s nose and mouth. But the gurney could also be tilted upright quickly, in the event the prisoner stopped breathing.Detainees would be strapped to the gurney for a two-hour “session.” During that session, the continuous flow of water onto a detainee’s face was not supposed to exceed 40 seconds during each pour. Interrogators could perform six separate 40-second pours during each session, for a total of four minutes of pouring. Detainees could be subjected to two of those two-hour sessions during a 24-hour period, which adds up to eight minutes of pouring. But the CIA’s guidelines say interrogators could pour water over the nose and mouth of a detainee for 12 minutes total during each 24-hour period.

(…)

One of the weirdest details in the documents is the revelation that the agency placed detainees on liquid diets prior to the use of waterboarding. That’s because during waterboarding, “a detainee might vomit and then aspirate the emesis,” Bradbury wrote. In other words, breathe in his own vomit. The CIA recommended the use of Ensure Plus for the liquid diet.

(…)

The CIA needed to keep many of its prisoners alive. It should be noted, though, that six human rights groups in 2007 released a report showing that 39 people who appeared to have gone into the CIA’s secret prison network haven’t shown up since.

(…)

As brutal as the waterboarding process was, the memos also reveal that the Bush-era Justice Department authorized the CIA to use it in combination with other forms of torture. Specifically, a detainee could be kept awake for more than seven days straight by shackling his hands in a standing position to a bolt in the ceiling so he could never sit down. The agency diapered and hand-fed its detainees during this period before putting them on the waterboard. Another memo from Bradbury, also from 2005, says that in between waterboarding sessions, a detainee could be physically slammed into a wall, crammed into a small box, placed in “stress positions” to increase discomfort and doused with cold water, among other things.

(…)

The CIA’s waterboarding regimen was so excruciating, the memos show, that agency officials found themselves grappling with an unexpected development: detainees simply gave up and tried to let themselves drown. “In our limited experience, extensive sustained use of the waterboard can introduce new risks,” the CIA’s Office of Medical Services wrote in its 2003 memo. “Most seriously, for reasons of physical fatigue or psychological resignation, the subject may simply give up, allowing excessive filling of the airways and loss of consciousness.”

Tags: CIA, torture, waterboarding
Category terrorism, U.S. politics |

Taliban's Top Military Commander Captured by Americans

Great success. NYT:

The Taliban’s top military commander was captured several days ago in Karachi, Pakistan, in a secret joint operation by Pakistani and American intelligence forces, according to American government officials.

The commander, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, is an Afghan described by American officials as the most significant Taliban figure to be detained since the American-led war in Afghanistan started more than eight years ago. He ranks second in influence only to Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Taliban’s founder and a close associate of Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11 attacks.

(…)

His capture could cripple the Taliban’s military operations, at least in the short term, said Bruce O. Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who last spring led the Obama administration’s Afghanistan and Pakistan policy review.

Tags: Afghanistan, CIA, Pakistan, Taliban
Category U.S. politics |