But now apparently the campaign to find terrorist boogie-men has come home with a vengeance. Just ask Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) informants Emilio and Analia Maya of Saugerties, New York. According to a fascinating Associated Press report by Helen O’Neill, on November 17, 2009, Emilio was surrounded by nine ICE officers in flak jackets with guns.
The recent decision of the UK High Court to release a seven paragraph summary of the torture perpetrated by U.S. agents upon Binyam Mohammed in April and early May 2002 is welcome news. The summary, written by a British court, was derived from 42 classified CIA documents delivered to the British legal authorities as part of an investigation into the actions of MI5 in the torture and interrogation of Binyam Mohamed and other prisoners held by Pakistan. These documents purportedly describe the torture of Mohamed, and indicate the collusion of U.S., British, and Pakistani authorities in the torture.
The role of Margolis, and the man himself, deserve a closer look. It does not take long to see that 40-plus year DoJ veteran David Margolis has some skeletons in his closet, and that his track record is not unblemished. In a July 2000 letter to the New York Review of Books by by E.L. Doctorow, Peter Matthiessen, William Styron, Rose Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, singled out Margolis as “point man” on a DoJ “vendetta” against Cointelpro victim Leonard Peltier.
Two reports coming out of Afghanistan illustrate the depth of hypocrisy and subterfuge characterizing the US/NATO intervention in that country. One could cite a myriad of such examples, so immoral and wrong is the US war there. In the first report, a 2009 human rights assessment prepared by Canada’s Foreign Affairs Department, obtained by The Canadian Press and reported at CBC News, revealed a skyrocketing suicide rate among Afghan women:
A January 8 release of documents in the ACLU FOIA lawsuit seeking materials related to the CIA’s destruction of videotapes of interrogators using “enhanced interrogation techniques” has revealed the first evidence of a precise instruction for the destruction of those tapes.
The typically restrained Obama State Department couldn’t raise itself to strenuously protest the most outrageous miscarriage of justice in quite a while. United Arab Emirates royal family member, Sheikh Issa bin Zayed al Nahyan, brother of the country’s Crown Prince, was caught on tape brutally torturing and attempting to murder a man he thought had cheated him on a business deal. The tape surfaced last year, but the crime occurred in 2004.
With all the debate and controversy over the Obama administration’s policies on torture, no one had asked the military, and in particular those running America’s “terror” prisons, if they had been using the Army Field Manual’s Appendix M. But recently the Guantanamo’s Public Affairs Officer, Lt. Commander Brook DeWalt, confirmed Appendix M interrogations were taking place at Guantanamo.
Back in May 2007, while researching the activities of the American Psychological Association (APA) in support of the U.S. government’s interrogation program, I came across evidence that the APA had engaged in a discussion of torture techniques during a workshop organized by APA and the RAND Corporation, “with generous funding from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).”
A close reading of the CIA’s Inspector General Report and the Senate Intelligence Committee’s narrative on the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) torture memos reveals a more detailed picture of the CIA’s involvement in the construction of those documents.
Professor Shane O’Mara at Trinity College Institute of Neuroscience in Dublin has written an article which has caught the attention of the mainstream media. Associated Press reporter Pamela Hess described Prof. O’Mara’s article,”Torturing the Brain: On the folk psychology and folk neurobiology motivating ‘enhanced and coercive interrogation techniques’” as showing that the CIA’s “severe interrogation techniques appear based on… a layman’s idea of how the brain works as opposed to science-based understanding of memory and cognitive function.”
