Two nuggets

By GottaLaff

Greg Sargent has two nuggets that caught my eye today:

[T]he White House has now released the most detailed chronology yet of the handling of the Christmas bomb plotter. Key takeaway: He was Mirandized nine hours after capture — and after FBI concluded he’d stopped talking.

How about that? Nine hours.

Then there's this little White House promise:

A key concession from Dan Pfeiffer: The White House shouldn’t have stood back and let Congress set the agenda. Vows it won’t happen again.

Gee, ya think?

Good vow. You know why? Because if it happens again, bye bye 2012, bye bye agenda, bye bye Democrats.

Underwear bomber talking again... without waterboarding

By GottaLaff

Well, well, Alice Ghostley, er, Susan Collins... guess who's opening his big yap again? And he didn't even have to be waterboarded!

Accused Christmas Day bomber Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab has started talking federal agents again, intelligence officials told a congressional panel Tuesday, even though he has been read his Miranda rights.

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein asked FBI Director Robert Mueller if Abdulmutallab’s interrogation was ongoing and if federal investigators were receiving new information from him.

“Yes,” Mueller replied.

What? Why... why... that's... constitutional!:

The revelation could deflate recent Republican attacks against the Obama administration’s decision to read Abdulmutallab his Miranda rights after he was treated for the burns he suffered when he tried to set off a bomb on Northwest Flight 243 on Christmas Day.

So much for Rushpublic talking points.

Report: CIA threatened to kill detainee's children, rape mother

By GottaLaff

So much to report, so little time. Earlier I posted about President Obama's new "interrogation" team. Now check this out:

A newly declassified CIA report says interrogators threatened to kill the children of a Sept. 11 suspect.

The document, released Monday by the Justice Department, says one interrogator said a colleague had told Khalid Sheikh Mohammed that if any other attacks happened in the United States, "We're going to kill your children."

Anyone still wondering why some of us are pushing so hard for a criminal investigation?

Another interrogator allegedly tried to convince a different terror suspect detainee that his mother would be sexually assaulted in front of him — though the interrogator in question denied making such a threat.

Of course he denied it. What did anyone expect them to say? "Yes, yes! I threatened to rape that guy's mom, because he was evil and I'm one of the good guys!"?

Pull one or two threads, things begin to unravel. If the investigations are narrowly focused, we can only hope that one discovery will lead to another, and another, and eventually, more and more truths will be revealed, and more and more of those operating outside the law, including those at the very top, will be held accountable.

Obama okays team to interrogate terrorists

By GottaLaff

Thank you, President Obama:

President Barack Obama has approved the establishment of a special unit of terrorist interrogators based out of the FBI, U.S. officials said Monday, confirming a report in the Washington Post.

The interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group will be overseen by the National Security Council and “draw on interrogators from defense, intelligence, and law enforcement,” a senior administration official said.

The State Department will also play a more prominent role in overseeing renditions of suspected terrorists to other countries for interrogation, the official added. The department will help ensure that suspected terrorists are not abused or tortured.

The decision to place the FBI in charge of the interrogation of suspected terrorists — as opposed to the Central Intelligence Agency — represents a major shift in U.S. national security policy. [...]

“The CIA didn’t want to house this initiative. They’re glad to be out of the long-term detention business,” a U.S. government official said.

More, via NPR:

The administration has also decided that all U.S. interrogators will follow the rules for detainees laid out by the Army Field Manual, according to senior administration officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the decision. That decision aims to end years of fierce debate over how rough U.S. personnel can get with terror suspects in custody.

The new unit does not mean the CIA is now out of the interrogation business, deputy White House press secretary Bill Burton told reporters covering the vacationing Obama at Oak Bluffs, Mass.

Lots of news breaking today. On to the next story....

UPDATE: Listening to Thom Hartmann Show right now, and this touting of the Army Field Manual as the golden standard should still be troubling to us. It would apparently still allow torture and mistreatment, Appendix M specifically, per Marjorie Cohn (MarjorieCohn.com).

U.S. Rebuffs U.N. Requests for Guantanamo Visits, Data on CIA Prisons

By GottaLaff

Heavy sigh:

The Obama administration has declined requests from U.N. human rights investigators for information on secret prisons and for private interviews with inmates at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, U.N. officials said, dampening their hopes of greater U.S. cooperation on human rights issues.

The rebuffs are the latest instances of the U.S. government resisting international human rights organizations' efforts to learn about Bush administration practices. [...]

U.S. officials said that they support the work of the U.N. human rights researchers but that they are constrained in releasing information on sensitive intelligence matters. They insist that they have not formally closed the door on visits to Guantanamo Bay.

U.S. efforts to engage the United Nations have been slowed because several key diplomatic positions in the Obama administration are still open or have just been filled.

"The Obama administration has taken aggressive action on this issue from day one, upholding our nation's fundamental values while making the American people safer," Mark Kornblau, a spokesman for the U.S. mission to the United Nations, said in a statement. "The President banned the use of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques, initiated a review of all pending cases at Guantanamo, and ordered that facility closed within one year."

Many U.N. human rights advocates acknowledge that President Obama has ended the worst practices of the Bush administration, including harsh interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, that the United Nations considers torture. But they say the old practices damaged the international human rights system, making it easier for brutal regimes to justify abuses. [...]

In March, Philip Alston, the U.N. official researching extrajudicial executions, criticized the Obama administration's refusal to rule out the use of military commissions or to investigate past practices.

But Alston, an Australian lawyer who teaches at New York University, said he has little power to compel the administration to change course. He said the United States' measured response to his report had diluted its impact; U.S. officials said they appreciated it but disagreed with portions. "By playing the good guy, not making a fuss, not even taking on any of the issues, the U.S. shrewdly helped to play the whole thing down," he said. He has since moved on to work on other nations.

All my previous posts on this subject matter 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.

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.

For Holder, Inquiry on Interrogation Poses Tough Choice

By GottaLaff

Today's episode of The Adventures of Attorney General Holder is brought to you by WTF, now with extra crispy frustration goodness!

As the attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., debates whether to appoint a criminal prosecutor to investigate the interrogations of terrorism suspects after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he is at the brink of a career-defining decision that risks the anger of the White House and the Central Intelligence Agency, one of the Justice Department’s main partners in combating terrorism. [...]

A decision by Mr. Holder to investigate would stand as a defining gesture of independence from Mr. Obama and would serve as a sharp contrast to predecessors like Alberto R. Gonzales, who was said by lawmakers in both parties to have run the Justice Department as a satellite office of the White House. [...]

Mr. Holder has told associates he is weighing a narrow investigation, focusing only on C.I.A. interrogators and contract employees who clearly crossed the line and violated the Bush administration’s guidelines and engaged in flagrantly abusive acts.

But in taking that route, Mr. Holder would run two risks. One is the political fallout if only a handful of low-level agents are prosecuted for what many critics see as a pattern of excess condoned at the top of the government. The other is that an aggressive prosecutor would not stop at the bottom, but would work up the chain of command, and end up with a full-blown criminal inquiry into the intelligence agencies — just the kind of broad, open-ended criminal investigation the Obama administration says it wants to avoid.

In a sense, Mr. Holder put himself in this awkward position. Earlier this year he successfully argued, in the face of C.I.A. protests, for the release of legal memorandums produced by the Justice Department during the Bush administration. [...]

A number of cases have been reviewed by nonpolitical prosecutors. But Mr. Holder is said to have raised questions about the thoroughness of some of those inquiries, including examinations of the deaths of detainees under C.I.A. and military control in Iraq. [...]

One of Mr. Holder’s first decisions, should he go forward with an inquiry, will be to determine who should investigate and what the scope of an investigation would be. Mr. Holder is said to have rejected the idea of naming an outside prosecutor and is considering candidates from inside the Justice Department.

The limited inquiry, at least initially, would review more than 20 abuse cases, including some involving prisoner deaths, which were referred to federal prosecutors in Virginia but did not result in prosecutions.

Former government lawyers involved in the cases have said they were, as one put it, “a complete mess.” Evidence had been lost or mishandled. Witnesses could not be located, and in some cases, not even the bodies of the deceased could be found.

In addition, an inquiry would probably examine whether the C.I.A. operatives who questioned high-level Qaeda detainees at secret prisons exceeded the Justice Department’s legal guidance. A footnote in a recently released 2005 Justice Department legal memorandum said that the C.I.A. inspector general had found in the 2004 report that interrogators used waterboarding with greater frequency and a larger volume of water than seemed to be approved by the Justice Department.

One word: Precedent. There has to be a way to hold those who broke the law responsible, or the crimes will continue. That much is a given. If you read Jane Mayer's The Dark Side, you'll more fully understand what atrocities occurred and how, under BushCo. Abuse continues, sadly, under the present administration. Fayiz al-Kandari would testify to that, if he and Lt. Col. Wingard were given a court date and access to evidence (other than hearsay).

The Obama Justice Department knows very well what took place, and if you read that book, so will you, to some extent. How can these revelations not justify a full criminal investigation?

As for the state of the evidence, described as a "complete mess"... well, now I'm back to helping myself to another steaming pile of WTF.

All my previous posts on this subject matter 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.

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.

H/t: VNDNBRG

Secret Interrogation Memos to be Released

By GottaLaff

File under Doing the Right Thing:

"After a tense internal debate, the Obama administration this afternoon will make public a number of detailed memos describing the harsh interrogation techniques used by the Central Intelligence Agency against al Qaeda suspects in secret overseas prisons," the New York Times reports.

"The interrogation methods were among the Bush administration's most closely guarded secrets, and today's release will be the most comprehensive public accounting to date of the interrogation program that some senior Obama administration officials have said used illegal torture."

The Wall Street Journal says that while "some operational details" of the interrogation program will be revealed, the administration will "keep secret the names of detainees and the way techniques were applied to particular prisoners."

CIA Shuts Secret Prisons Under Obama Order

By GottaLaff

This is great news, but all I can think of at the moment is all the damage that's already been done:

The CIA is no longer operating secret prisons used to interrogate terror suspects with harsh techniques such as waterboarding, the agency's director has said.

Leon Panetta confirmed the move in response to an order from Barack Obama, which was one of his first after taking office as US President in January.

"CIA no longer operates detention facilities or black sites and has proposed a plan to decommission the remaining sites," the spy chief said in a letter to agency employees.

"I have directed our agency personnel to take charge of the decommissioning process and have further directed that the contracts for site security be promptly terminated." [...]

Mr Panetta said the CIA retained the authority to detain suspects "on a short-term transitory basis".

But he added agents would use "a dialogue style of questioning that is fully consistent with the interrogation approaches authorised and listed in the Army Field Manual," which bans harsh techniques.

"CIA officers do not tolerate, and will continue to promptly report, any inappropriate behaviour or allegations of abuse," he said.

"That holds true whether a suspect is in the custody of an American partner or a foreign liaison service."

CIA destroyed 92 interrogation tapes

Somebody needs to be prosecuted for this malfeasance. I'm looking at you George...

WASHINGTON- New documents show the CIA destroyed nearly 100 tapes of terror interrogations, far more than has previously been acknowledged.

The revelation Monday comes as a criminal prosecutor is wrapping up his investigation in the matter.

The acknowledgment of dozens of destroyed tapes came in a letter filed by government lawyers in New York, where the American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking more details of terror interrogation programs.

"The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed," said the letter by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin. "Ninety two videotapes were destroyed."

The tapes became a contentious issue in the trial of Sept. 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, after prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then acknowledged two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.

Female FBI officer 'tortured Mumbai terror attacks suspect with sex'

By GottaLaff

Uh-huh, sure, of course, it's our freedoms they hate us for... not this:

A female FBI officer tortured a suspect in the Mumbai terrorist attacks by performing a sex act on him during interrogation, it has been claimed.

Fahim Ansari is accused of helping to plan the attacks in which 173 people were killed in November.

His lawyer, Ejaz Naqvi, has filed legal papers with Mumbai magistrate's court, claiming the "white woman" removed all his clothes and showed him pornographic films.

In the papers, he claims that three foreigners, including the woman, sexually abused him, causing him "severe itching and wounds" on his body, including his genitals.

Mr Ansari, a devout Muslim, claims this amounts to torture because it is against his religion, The Sun newspaper has reported.

A court in the Indian city ordered medical checks on "wounds on his private parts and all over his body."

You know what depresses me? That, based on what I've learned over the past 8 years, I'm more inclined to believe him than not.