Commenter in "New Yorker" seeks info on tortured, murdered uncle/detainee's body

By GottaLaff

The Salt Pit

Jane Mayer has a piece out in the New Yorker that is a must-read. It concerns the death of a detainee, and includes a revelation about the unintended identification of the detention C.I.A. officer who was allegedly responsible:

In an apparent oversight, however, the identity of the manager of the Salt Pit at the time of Rahman’s death appeared recently in a public document. The officer, who continues to work for the C.I.A., is mentioned by name in a footnote in the October, 2009, legal response to allegations of unprofessional conduct filed by lawyers for Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel. The Bybee document was released last February by the Justice Department. Apparently unnoticed at the time, it revealed both the surname of the Salt Pit manager and the identity of the victim, Rahman.

[UPDATE, April 1, 6:40 P.M.: In an interesting disappearing act, unspecified government officials have now mysteriously redacted the name of the C.I.A. officer in charge of the Salt Pit from the public record described above. The document is easily accessible on the House Judiciary Committee’s Web site (pdf). But where footnote No. 28 previously identified the surname of the Salt Pit manager, as of April 1st, the name has been blacked out. The victim’s name, however, is still visible. It was evidently too late to keep that out of the public eye after the A.P. story.]

The story is horrendous, the deeds unspeakable. But something on that page caught my eye in Comments:

can you please tell us about the death body of rehman from where we can get it i am his nephew

Posted 3/31/2010, 11:32:10pm by sulimankhail

Think about that for a moment.

A news story about the death of a detainee at a black site causes a person who identifies himself as family, as the nephew of the victim, to try to locate the body after eight years... in a comment under the post.

He is asking for help in getting the body of a family member back. In Comments.

Assuming "sulimankhail" is who he says he is, what does this tell you? How does it make you feel that torture and murder has been done in our name... and now a prisoner's relative has to leave a comment under a story in the New Yorker in order to find the remains of his uncle?

I'm ashamed, and I am sickened.

A related story drives the point home:

Michael Sulick, head of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service, told a student audience last week that the spy agency has seen no fall-off in intelligence since waterboarding was banned by the Obama administration.

Be proud, BushCo.

****

All my previous posts on this subject matter can be found here; That link includes one specific to only Fayiz al-Kandari's story here. Here are audio and video interviews with Lt. Col. Wingard, one by David Shuster, one by Ana Marie Cox, and more. My guest commentary at BuzzFlash is here.

Lt. Col. Barry Wingard is a military attorney who represents Fayiz Al-Kandari in the Military Commission process and in no way represents the opinions of his home state. When not on active duty, Colonel Wingard is a public defender in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

If you are inclined to help rectify these injustices: Twitterers, use the hashtag #FreeFayiz. We have organized a team to get these stories out. If you are interested in helping Fayiz out, e-mail me at The Political Carnival, address in sidebar to the right; or tweet me at @GottaLaff.

If you'd like to see other ways you can take action, go here and scroll down to the end of the article.

Then read Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side. You'll have a much greater understanding of why I post endlessly about this, and why I'm all over the CIA deception issues, too.

More of Fayiz's story here, at Answers.com.

VIDEOS- Jane Mayer: "U.S. rights thrown out the window", Bush warned "This may be criminal"

By GottaLaff

This is Part 28349239 in my series, primarily about an innocent prisoner held for the past 7+ years at Gitmo, Fayiz al-Kandari, as told to me by his military attorney, Lt. Col. Barry Wingard.

All previous posts can be found here; That link includes audio and video interviews with Lt. Col. Wingard, one by David Shuster, one by Ana Marie Cox, and more. My guest commentary at BuzzFlash is here.

This post introduces you to Jane Mayer, for those who haven't yet seen her or read her book:

August 15, 2008

There has been significant debate about the United States' tactics in the fight against terrorism and how they have undermined America's moral authority. Recently, I spoke with two authors who have new books out on the subject. Jane Mayer is an investigative reporter for The Yew Yorker. Her book is called The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. Philip Gourevitch, editor of the Paris Review, co-authored the book Standard Operating Procedure.

Here’s another in our series of short video interviews, each running a minute (give or take), with PBC authors. This one’s with Jane Mayer, author of The Dark Side, which tells the inside story of how the US government shredded the Constitution after 9/11, adopting “war on terror” policies —indefinite detention, rendition, torture—that violated the most basic and cherished American values.

Our system of justice is broken. Military commissions rely on coerced confessions and hearsay, something Jane Mayer covers in great detail in her book..

If you are inclined to help rectify these injustices: Twitterers, use the hashtag #FreeFayiz. We have organized a team to get these stories out. If you are interested in helping Fayiz out, e-mail me at The Political Carnival, address in sidebar to the right; or tweet me at @GottaLaff.

If you'd like to see other ways you can take action, go here and scroll down to the end of the article.

Then read Jane Mayer's book The Dark Side. You'll have a much greater understanding of why I post endlessly about this, and why I'm all over the CIA deception issues, too.

Video: Jane Mayer, David Letterman, and The Dark Side

By GottaLaff



I'm putting this up without having seen it. Why would I do that, you ask? Because my server is lethargic and will only load some sites, and won't let me play videos. So let me know how this is. Jane Mayer wrote the book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals.

Trying to post today has been an exercise in frustration. In fact, anything computer-related this month has been torture, which makes this post even more relevant. Waterboarding might even seem like recreation after my little misadventures.

So please tell me in comments what the video was like. I don't have a clue.

"This time the crime is worse than the cover-up"

By GottaLaff

Via Frank Rich, we get a peek into the pages of The Dark Side, by Jane Mayer. Her revelations are chilling:

We learn, for instance, that in 2004 two conservative Republican Justice Department officials had become “so paranoid” that “they actually thought they might be in physical danger.” The fear of being wiretapped by their own peers drove them to speak in code.

The men were John Ashcroft’s deputy attorney general, James Comey, and an assistant attorney general, Jack Goldsmith. Their sin was to challenge the White House’s don, Dick Cheney, and his consigliere, his chief of staff David Addington, when they circumvented the Geneva Conventions to make torture the covert law of the land.

But impeachment is off the table.

Ms. Mayer uncovered another damning verdict: Red Cross investigators flatly told the C.I.A. last year that America was practicing torture and vulnerable to war-crimes charges.

Top Bush hands are starting to get sweaty about where they left their fingerprints. Scapegoating the rotten apples at the bottom of the military’s barrel may not be a slam-dunk escape route from accountability anymore.

One can only hope.

In her telling, a major incentive for Mr. Cheney’s descent into the dark side was to cover up for the Bush White House’s failure to heed the Qaeda threat in 2001. Jack Cloonan, a special agent for the F.B.I.’s Osama bin Laden unit until 2002, told Ms. Mayer that Sept. 11 was “all preventable.” By March 2000, according to the C.I.A.’s inspector general, “50 or 60 individuals” in the agency knew that two Al Qaeda suspects — soon to be hijackers — were in America. But there was no urgency at the top. Thomas Pickard, the acting F.B.I. director that summer, told Ms. Mayer that when he expressed his fears about the Qaeda threat to Mr. Ashcroft, the attorney general snapped, “I don’t want to hear about that anymore!” [...]

The biggest torture-fueled wild-goose chase, of course, is the war in Iraq.

And the money line:

We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all.

Put impeachment back on the table. Start the hearings. Our government is run by war criminals.