Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sat stone silent inside the courtroom at the US Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, refusing to answer routine questions from the judge presiding over his arraignment for war crimes. Four other co-defendants, who are being tried alongside the man now commonly referred to as KSM, took their cues from the self-professed mastermind of the 9/11 attacks and also refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of the military commissions, in what their lawyers described as an act of “peaceful resistance.”

That was the scene at the chaotic, marathon hearing that took place at Guantanamo May 7, and just the latest example of how, over the years, KSM “has controlled the legal proceedings against him, organizing his fellow captives to act as a group and then putting himself in charge,” journalists Terry McDermott and Josh Meyer write in their timely and groundbreaking new book, “The Hunt for KSM.”

KSM “mocked the military courts, preached, instructed, or obstructed as the need arose …” McDermott and Meyer write.

“The Hunt for KSM,” subtitled, “Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,” is not just a page-turning spy thriller that masterfully reveals how the FBI and CIA failed to capture Mohammed at least a half-dozen times in the eight years leading up to 9/11, but it’s also a story about the investigative reporters’ own decade-long “hunt” for intelligence about “one of the worst mass murderers in American history.”

Ten years ago, while working as reporters at The Los Angeles Times, McDermott, Meyer and their colleague Patrick McDonnell published the first substantive profile of KSM, describing him as the “operational commander of Al Qaeda” most responsible for the terrorist organization’s attacks, whose significance was “underestimated” by the FBI.

“He was under everybody’s radar,” a senior FBI official told the reporters at the time. “We don’t know how he did it. We wish we knew…. He’s the guy nobody ever heard of.”

Exactly how KSM “did it” is what McDermott and Meyer were determined to find out. What they discovered in the decade since they published that 9,000-word report in The Los Angeles Times is truly disturbing and, yet again, undercuts the government’s narrative about who knew what and when. KSM eluded capture because no one, except for an FBI agent and a Port Authority detective, was looking for him prior to 9/11, yet everyone in intelligence and federal law enforcement circles knew where he was and knew what he was planning.

The FBI and CIA were so “laser focused” on Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network, which McDermott said he believes never was and isn’t now an “existential threat to the US,” that the agencies failed to comprehend KSM’s importance. Furthermore, the CIA and FBI never connected the dots related to the intelligence information in their possession that indicated how both men had “joined forces,” one of the intelligence community’s “greatest mistakes, McDermott said.

The lapses continued well after 9/11, due, in part, to the blame game going on between the CIA and FBI over the catastrophic attacks.

“I thought about this for a long time,” McDermott said in an interview. “Not only could 9/11 have been prevented it should have been prevented. I just think the number of mistakes that allowed KSM to evade capture is legion. If they [the CIA/FBI] put the effort into it they would have easily found him.”

Meyer agreed with his co-author. He recently told NPR, “If Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had been taken off the battlefield or captured when the authorities had a chance to do that in the mid-’90s, there simply would not have been a 9/11 attack.”

The FBI is treated more favorably in their book, McDermott said, because the bureau “at least tried” to capture him.

A report I published with my colleague, Jeffrey Kaye, also described how, as early as 1999, a top-secret military intelligence unit likely identified the house where KSM planned the 9/11 attacks, according to documents we obtained. But for reasons that remain a mystery, the intelligence community appears to not have acted upon the information.

McDermott, who is also the author of a book on the 9/11 hijackers, “Perfect Soldiers,” said in addition to fleshing out the narrative about the “bureaucratic ineptitude” that allowed KSM to hide in plain sight while working on other terrorist attack plans, including the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, he and Meyer were also determined to craft a deeper story about KSM, the man and the intelligence officials who tracked him.

They split their reporting duties into “cops and robbers,” with McDermott traveling to Pakistan and the Middle East to speak with KSM’s associates and family members, and Meyer, currently co-director of the National Security Initiative at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, working his sources at the FBI and CIA.

“When you’re researching someone who are you going to talk to?” McDermott said. “You’re going to talk to friends, family and co-workers. You just keep knocking on doors, send letters, faxes, courier deliveries. Eventually, you find enough people who will talk to you that you have a story. And that’s what this was.”

Their gumshoe reporting paid off big time. KSM, the authors discovered, was a “rebellious” youth who, along with a cousin, “climbed the flagpole atop their elementary schoolhouse and tore down the Kuwaiti flag.” KSM was also an excellent student who “excelled” at science. At 16, KSM followed in the footsteps of his brother and began attending camps of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is where he “first heard the call to jihad.”

Humanizing KSM, however, was “stupidly difficult,” McDermott said.

“It was hard in a dumb, mulish way,” McDermott said. “I found KSM’s brother after looking for him for 10 years. And then he wouldn’t talk to me. He threw me off of his doorstep and threatened to have me arrested for invasion of privacy. I said, ‘Jesus Christ, man, your brother’s a mass murderer!’”

After KSM was captured in March 2003, McDermott said the CIA, then headed by George Tenet, ultimately won the internal blame war against the FBI over 9/11 failures, which ultimately allowed the agency to implement a program micromanaged by Vice President Dick Cheney: enhanced interrogation.

“Vice President Dick Cheney went on national television and warned that the United States would no doubt have to venture onto the ‘dark side’ in order to pursue and punish its enemies,” McDermott and Meyer write. “Cheney, more than any other individual, was the architect of the new War on Terror. He made it clear that doubt and nuance had no role to play in this new world. The FBI’s customary ways of doing business were not a fit for what Cheney had in mind, and perhaps chiefly for that reason the Bureau lost its status as the preeminent antiterror agency.”

McDermott said he believes the catalyst that led the Bush administration to implement the torture program was trying to find out “what’s the next attack?” I don’t agree with McDermott’s assertion as I am of the mind that the torture program was about exploitation, obtaining false confessions and turning captives into informants.

“The CIA was looking for something that didn’t exist,” McDermott said during our interview, explaining why KSM was brutalized. “The CIA’s sole focus was on the next attack. Here’s the problem: there was no next attack, there were hundreds of them. There were a multitude of plots. The CIA was looking for the next ‘spectacular’ and there was none. I’ve always wondered why torture was used too. Aside from the immorality of it, we know torture doesn’t work. The person being tortured will say anything to make the torture stop. But [the CIA] used it anyway. The outcome was almost fated.”

The information the CIA obtained by torturing KSM was “bad, made up,” he would later say, “so the torture would stop.” His false confessions, the cornerstone of the program, however, sent intelligence and law enforcement officials on “wild goose chases”–literally–in an attempt to stop nonexistent terrorist attacks.

“He had us chasing the goddamn geese in Central Park because he said some of them had explosives stuffed up their ass,” former FBI counterterrorism agent, Ali Soufan, told the authors.

McDermott and Meyer write that in addition to being waterboarded, a form of controlled drowning, 183 times, KSM was deprived of sleep for a week, “hog-tied, stripped naked, photographed, hooded, beaten, kicked, suffocated, exposed to extreme cold and noise, denied food and sleep, sedated with anal suppositories, placed in diapers and hung by his wrists until they bled.”

“KSM bragged later about sending American agents scurrying around the globe on the impossible task of trying to distinguish the truths from the half truths and lies,” McDermott and Meyer write.

Those details are what makes “The Hunt for KSM” required reading. Its revelations are an important reminder that the government has been in control of the narrative for far too long.

The years KSM spent at CIA black site prisons around the world, where his interrogators used methods of torture to extract false confessions, all but ensures that “his full story will never be told” and justice will never truly be served to the mass murderer.

“For reasons that perplex even its best friends, the United States has kept Mohammed in the shadows of its secret prisons for so long it seems likely he can now never be fully exposed to the light for fear of what he might say about what went on in the darkness.”

KSM secured his final victory a couple of years ago when Congress thwarted Attorney General Eric Holder’s efforts to prosecute KSM and four other 9/11 co-defendants in federal court in New York City. Democrat and Republican lawmakers feared his trial in Article III courts would make the city vulnerable to another terrorist attack.

It is through KSM’s “ability to strike fear, which is the first goal of all terrorism,” McDermott and Meyer write, that the true mastermind of the 9/11 attacks has been able to retain “his power,” even to this day, as evidenced by the initial response to Holder’s announcement about the venue in which KSM would be prosecuted.

“KSM, years after he was last able to issue a single order, remained, in some real sense, in command.”

This image of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was taken in July 2009 under an agreement with Guantanamo prison camp staff that lets Red Cross delegates photograph detainees and send photos to family members.

The eyes of the world were on Guantánamo, as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and four other men accused of planning and facilitating the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 — Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali, Mustafa Ahmed al-Hawsawi and Walid bin Attash — appeared in a courtroom for the first time since December 2008. All were dressed in white, apparently at the insistence of the authorities at Guantánamo, and most observers made a point of noting that Mohammed’s long gray beard was streaked red with henna.

For the Obama administration and the Pentagon, the five men’s appearance — for their arraignment prior to their planned trial by military commission — was supposed to show that the commissions are a competent and legitimate alternative to the federal court trial that the Obama administration announced for the men in November 2009, but then abandoned after caving in to pressure from Republicans. The five defendants face 2,976 counts of murder — one for each of the victims of the 9/11 attacks — as well as charges of terrorism, hijacking, conspiracy and destruction of property, and the prosecution is seeking the death penalty.

Unfortunately for the administration, the omens were not good. The military commissions have been condemned as an inadequate trial system ever since the Bush administration first resurrected them in November 2001, intending, in the heat of post-9/11 vengeance, to use them to swiftly try and execute those it regarded as terrorists. However, after long delays and chaotic hearings, this first reincarnation of the commissions was struck down as illegal by the Supreme Court in June 2006. The commissions were then revived by Congress a few months later, and were then tweaked and revived by President Obama in the summer of 2009, despite criticism from legal experts.

However, in all these years, just seven cases have been decided. Under Bush, there was a plea deal for the Australian David Hicks; a short sentence for Salim Hamdan, who drove a car for Osama bin Laden; and a life sentence for Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who made a video for al-Qaeda, and refused to participate in his trial. Since Obama revived the commissions another four cases have been decided by plea deal — those of Ibrahim al-Qosi, a cook; Omar Khadr, a child at the time of his capture; Noor Uthman Muhammed, a training camp instructor; and Majid Khan, an alleged accomplice of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Another case — that of Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged bomber of the USS Cole — is also proceeding to trial, but it is fair to say that the 9/11 trial is the barometer of whether or not the commissions are credible, or whether they are a second-tier judicial system, and the proceedings are little better than show trials.

On that basis, Saturday’s arraignment rather spectacularly failed to fulfil the administration’s hopes. As the Guardian noted, the hearing “descended into chaos,” as the defendants “refused to acknowledge the judge and their lawyers repeatedly challenged the legitimacy of the court.”

At the last appearance of the five men in 2008, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed had tried to plead guilty, and to become a martyr by being executed, but on Saturday he was more in the mood for quiet resistance, undermining the proceedings by refusing to acknowledge the judge. As the Washington Post described it, “The normally loquacious Mohammed refused to speak publicly throughout Saturday’s hearing, a stance that was largely adopted by all the other defendants, who tend to follow his lead.”

Also noteworthy was the behavior of Walid bin Attash, an amputee, who was brought to the courtroom strapped into a restraining chair, after some kind of altercation outside, and only had his restraints removed when he promised to behave, and the behavior of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, whose mental health has long been called into question by his lawyers.

At one point bin al-Shibh and Ali Abd al-Aziz Ali interrupted the proceedings by praying, at at another point bin al-Shibh shouted out, comparing Guantánamo to the prisons of Muammar Gaddafi, the former dictator of Syria. “Era of Gaddafi is over but you have Gaddafi in [Guantánamo] camp,” he said, adding, “Maybe they are going to kill us and say that we are committing suicide.” This was a sign, perhaps, that he had heard of the dubious circumstances in which five prisoners died at Guantánamo: three in June 2006, and two others in 2007 and 2009, and had even, perhaps, heard about the dubious death, in a Libyan prison in May 2009, of Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi, the emir of a training camp in Afghanistan who had also been held in CIA “black sites,” and had been rendered to Egypt, where, under torture, he had falsely confessed that there were connections between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, which, nevertheless, were used to justify the invasion of Iraq in March 2003.

The arraignment took 13 hours to complete, although that was largely because of the men’s defense lawyers, who persistently attempted to question the credibility of the commissions, and made the most of their opportunity to question the judge’s impartiality, through the process known as voir dire. While this was happening, the defendants were mostly silent, and passed around the latest copy of the Economist, which may or may not have provided a boost to the London-based weekly magazine’s appeal. According to the Washington Post, throughout the hearing Khalid Sheikh Mohammed “whispered messages to his comrades, and they chatted and joked with one another during a short recess.”

By the end of the arraignment, none of the defendants had entered a plea, and the judge, Army Col. James Pohl, adjourned proceedings until June 12, and tentatively set a trial date of May 2013, although, as the Guardian explained, he “acknowledged that there are likely to be more delays.” Throughout the day, he had tried to maintain his composure, but occasionally appeared rattled. When it became clear that the accused were going to refuse to participate in the proceedings, he stated that a plea of not guilty would eventually be entered on their behalf, adding, “One cannot choose not to participate and frustrate the normal course of business,” and at another point he asked in exasperation, “Why is this so hard?”

Leading the defense’s complaints on Saturday, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s lawyer, David Nevin, told the court that “the world is watching” the proceedings, and when the accused removed their headphones, through which they were receiving a translation of what Judge Pohl was saying, he explained that, in Mohammed’s case, “The reason he’s not putting the headphones in his ears is because of the torture imposed on him.” Nevin then “asked to be allowed to elaborate,” as the Guardian described it, but Judge Pohl refused.

Nevin’s attempts to raise the question of the men’s torture in secret CIA prisons for up to three and a half years before their transfer to Guantánamo in September 2006 was the most explicit attempt to allow discussion of how the men have been treated, although as was noted in the Daily Beast by Terry McDermott (the author, with Josh Meyer, of The Hunt for KSM: Inside the Pursuit and Takedown of the Real 9/11 Mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed), Judge Pohl deflected almost all the defense’s arguments, telling the lawyers that there would be time for them to raise whatever they thought was important at the next hearing in June. As McDermott explained, “He indicated he would eventually allow defense lawyers to argue every issue they wanted.”

In his perceptive article, McDermott noted that, after Walid bin Attash’s attorney, Cheryl Borman, had told Judge Pohl that her client had been “repeatedly beaten by guards at Guantánamo,” he was obliged to point out that the treatment of the prisoners was something over which he “had little or no control,” although he stated that he “would investigate with the relevant authorities.” For McDermott, his “relative powerlessness over events beyond the courtroom” provided a vivid demonstration of the “central contradiction” of the commissions, which he described as “the attempt to conduct trials granting nearly all rights enjoyed in US courts when the defendants are prisoners in one of the most heavily controlled prisons in the world — held, usually in solitary confinement, under extreme security with almost all access to the outside world eliminated.”

As McDermott added:

Their lawyers are thousands of miles away and require special flights just to get to Guantánamo. Even when there, the lawyers are unable to talk with their clients about anything the American military decides is classified. This includes all issues having to do with the prisoners’ treatment. Thus, defense lawyers can’t talk in court about the specifics of their clients’ complaints.

Just before the hearing began, the ACLU submitted a motion (PDF) calling for the judge “to reject the government’s attempts to censor any statements by defendants in the 9/11 military commission proceedings about their detention and treatment in US custody.”

As the ACLU explained:

[T]he government has asked or will ask this Commission to issue a protective order accepting the government’s claim that any statements made by the defendants concerning their “exposure” to the Central Intelligence Agency’s (“CIA”) detention and interrogation program are presumptively classified and must be kept from the public. The government has also asked or will ask the Commission to accept its assertion that defendants’ statements concerning their personal knowledge and experience of their imprisonment and treatment in Department of Defense (“DOD”) custody are classified and must be suppressed.

The ACLU also asked the judge not to accept the government’s insistence that there must be “a 40-second delay in the audio feed the government makes available to the public, media, and representatives of non-governmental organizations who observe the tribunal,” in order to “permit a courtroom security official to cut off the audio feed whenever the defendants describe their detention and interrogation in US custody.”

The 40-second delay was only used briefly on one occasion on Saturday, apparently when Walid bin Attash said something that prosecutors wanted suppressed, but how secrets are dealt with is central to the 9/11 trial and its claim to credibility, and it remains to be seen whether Judge Pohl will genuinely acknowledge the tensions between the absolute secrecy surrounding the Bush administration’s torture program and the need for something that resembles a fair hearing in the men’s trial by military commission.

What is clear, at present, is that, in the five years and eight months since Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, his co-defendants and nine other “high-value detainees” arrived at Guantánamo from the CIA’s secret prisons, the only words that any of them have uttered that have been made available to the public are the words they said at their pre-trial hearings — in the cases of KSM and his co-accused, what they said in June, September and December 2008, and on Saturday. Everything else — every single word that has been exchanged between these 14 men and their lawyers — is presumptively classified.

This not unusual in the sense that every word exchanged between the other prisoners in Guantánamo and their lawyers is also presumptively classified, but in the cases of the other prisoners, at least parts of these exchanges have been unclassified after being reviewed by a team of Pentagon censors known as the privilege review team. In the cases of the “high-value detainees,” however, every single word remains classified.

The only possible reason for this is to prevent any discussion of of the torture to which these men were subjected in CIA “black sites” from leaking out of Guantánamo.

This is something that was noted last week in an article for Salon by the commissions’ former chief prosecutor, Col. Morris Davis, who resigned in October 2007, when he was placed in a chain of command under William J. Haynes II, the Pentagon’s General Counsel, who insisted that information derived through the use of torture would be used in the commissions.

Dismissing the administration’s spurious claims that military commissions are necessary because soldiers on a battlefield cannot spend their time worrying about reading rights to prisoners in wartime, Col. Davis stated:

[T]he reason the apologists want a second-rate military commission option is because of what we did to the detainees, not because of what the detainees did to us. This is not about the exigencies of the battlefield and the problems our soldiers face trying to fight a war; this is about torture, coercion, rendition and a decade or more in confinement without an opportunity to confront the evidence — abuses that would have us up in arms if done to an American citizen by some other country — that make the tarnished military commissions uniquely suited to try and accommodate the small category of cases where we crossed over to the dark side.

And that, in short, is the key problem with the commissions that dare not speak its name, and that Judge Pohl will have to decide whether or not to tackle — whether the search for justice is even possible when those who are supposed to be subjected to it were also the victims of America’s journey to “the dark side.”

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Jose Rodriguez, former Director of the CIA's National Clandestine Service

Law-abiding US citizens have been appalled that Jose Rodriguez, the director of the CIA’s National Clandestine Service until his retirement in 2007, was invited onto CBS’s “60 Minutes” program last weekend to promote his book Hard Measures: How Aggressive CIA Actions After 9/11 Saved American Lives, in which he defends the use of torture on “high-value detainees” captured in the Bush administration’s “war on terror,” even though that was — and is — illegal under US and international law.

Rodriguez joins an elite club of war criminals — including George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld — who, instead of being prosecuted for using torture, or authorizing its use, have, instead, been allowed to write books, go on book tours and appear on mainstream TV to attempt to justify their unjustifiable actions.

All claim to be protected by the “golden shield” offered by their inside man, John Yoo, part of a group of lawyers who aggressively pushed the lawlessness of the “war on terror.” Abusing his position as a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, whose mandate is to provide impartial legal advice to the executive branch, Yoo instead attempted to redefine torture and approved its use — including the use of waterboarding, an ancient torture technique and a form of controlled drowning — on an alleged “high-value detainee,” Abu Zubaydah, in two memos, dated August 1, 2002, that will forever be known as the “torture memos.”

Unfortunately, for those who abhor the use of torture and respect the rule of law, President Obama refused to allow Yoo — and his boss, Jay S. Bybee — to be punished. A four-year internal ethics investigation concluded in January 2010 that Yoo and Bybee had been guilty of “professional misconduct,” which would have led to professional sanctions, but a senior DoJ fixer, David Margolis, was allowed — or encouraged — to override those conclusions, stating instead that both men had, understandably, been under great pressure following the 9/11 attacks, and had only exercised “poor judgment,” which was the equivalent of nothing more than a slap on the wrist.

No one bothered mentioning that Article 2.2 of the UN Convention against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, to which the US became a signatory under Ronald Reagan, declares: “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification of torture.”

And so, last Sunday, Jose Rodriguez was allowed to undertake his own redefinition of torture, essentially unchallenged, and on mainstream TV. With a disturbingly macho presentation that left Charles Pierce of Esquire “pretty convinced that Rodriguez is both a sociopath and a maniac,” as well as a war criminal, he brushed off criticism of the use of torture by saying, “We made some al-Qaeda with American blood on their hands uncomfortable for a few days, but we did the right thing for the right reason. The right reason to protect the homeland and to protect American lives.”

As Amy Davidson noted in the New Yorker, he also “bragged about its use in proving the manhood of the torturer,” stating, “We needed to get everybody in government to put their big boy pants on and provide the authorities that we needed,” and “talked as if torture were an expression of strength, rather than momentary domination masking the most abject moral and practical weakness.” For Glenn Greenwald, the reference to “big boy pants” exposed “a whole new level of psychosexual creepiness.”

On specific techniques, Rodriguez defended the use of waterboarding by saying, of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who was subjected to waterboarding 183 times, “I don’t know what kind of man it takes to cut the throat of someone in front of a camera like that [a reference to KSM's unproved confession that he personally killed US journalist Daniel Pearl], but I can tell you this is probably someone who didn’t give a rat’s ass about having water poured on his face.”

He also defended the use of physical violence and nudity by pointing out that “[t]he objective is to let him [the detainee] know there’s a new sheriff in town and he better pay attention,” compared sleep deprivation to “jet lag,” and, reflecting on the use of “stress positions” over many hours, said, “I was thinking about this the other day. The objective was to induce muscle fatigue, and most people who work out do a lot more fatiguing of the muscles.”

At another point in the interview, Rodriguez also made reference to the psychologists — including James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen — who had worked on the US military’s program for using torture to train US personnel to resist interrogation if captured by a hostile enemy, which was reverse engineered and provided the basis of the torture program in the “war on terror.” Their particular contribution was to stress that detainees must be broken down to a state of “learned helplessness” (a concept conceived by US psychologist Martin Seligman in the 1960s), in which all resistance is futile, and the detainee becomes completely dependant on his interrogators. Speaking of this, Rodriguez stated, “This program was about instilling a sense of hopelessness and despair on the terrorist, on the detainee, so that he would conclude on his own that he was better off cooperating with us.”

To be spouting all of the above on mainstream TV without, essentially, any comeback from the host, Lesley Stahl, or from those who should be enforcing America’s obligations to prosecute torturers, is depressing enough, but it was not all that was wrong. Rodriguez also spoke openly of the crime for which he is most generally known — the destruction of 92 videotapes that contained the “interrogations” in Thailand of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, another “high-value detainee” who was waterboarded. As Glenn Greenwald explained last week:

At the time the destruction order was issued, numerous federal courts — as well as the 9/11 Commission — had ordered the US Government to preserve and disclose all evidence relating to interrogations of Al-Qaeda and 9/11 suspects. Purposely destroying evidence relevant to legal proceedings is called “obstruction of justice.” Destroying evidence which courts and binding tribunals (such as the 9/11 Commission) have ordered to be preserved is called “contempt of court.” There are many people who have been harshly punished, including some sitting right now in prison, for committing those crimes in far less flagrant ways than was done here. In fact, so glaring was the lawbreaking that the co-Chairmen of the 9/11 Commission — the mild-mannered, consummate establishmentarians Lee Hamilton and Thomas Kean — wrote a New York Times Op-Ed pointedly accusing the CIA of “obstruction” (“Those who knew about those videotapes — and did not tell us about them — obstructed our investigation”).

As with John Yoo and Jay S. Bybee, Rodriguez was never punished. An investigation into the destruction of the videotapes began under George W. Bush, and continued under Obama, but in November 2010 the DoJ announced that the investigation would be closed without any charges being filed. As Greenwald explained, Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who had ordered the CIA to preserve and produce the tapes, “refused even to hold the CIA in contempt for deliberately disregarding his own order.” Instead, he “reasoned that punishment for the CIA was unnecessary because, as he put it, new rules issued by the CIA ‘should lead to greater accountability within the agency and prevent another episode like the videotapes’ destruction.’”

However, while Rodriguez — like John Yoo, Jay S. Bybee and senior Bush administration officials, up to and including the President — continues to get away with his crimes, it is uncertain if, overall, the apologists for torture are winning. For them to succeed in persuading enough ordinary Americans that the law doesn’t actually apply to the US president, or anyone working for him, they also need to establish that all this torturing kept America safe, and on this front, despite their protestations over the years, they have no proof that torture worked.

In his interview, Rodriguez wheeled out the tired old lies about torture leading to the capture of “high-value detainees.” In a moment of courage, Lesley Stahl mentioned well-established claims that Abu Zubaydah’s torture had led operatives on countless wild goose chases, to which Rodriguez replied, “Bullshit. He gave us a road map that allowed us to capture a bunch of Al-Qaeda senior leaders.” In contrast, of course, former FBI interrogator Ali Soufan pointed out last year that torture did not yield important leads, and that, for example, information from Abu Zubaydeh pointing to Khalid Sheikh Muhammad’s central role in the 9/11 attacks came before the CIA’s torturers took over his interrogations.

Soufan also pointed out the difference between torturers and skilled interrogators, which CNN described as follows:

“There is a difference between compliance and cooperation,” he said. Compliance can result from torture — a detainee will do anything to make the rough treatment end. But real cooperation, says Soufan, comes from engaging the detainee after learning everything possible about them.

Torture’s apologists always want to deny the importance of skilled interrogators, who conduct extensive research on their subjects and often spend a long time building up a rapport with them. Instead, they permanently seek to reinforce the macho idiocy of their preferred approach, which is driven more by vengeance and bloodlust than anything else.

In Rodriguez’s case, he also resorted to claims that torture had led to the capture of Osama bin Laden, telling Dana Priest of the Washington Post last week, “I am certain, beyond any doubt, that these techniques, approved at the highest levels of the US government, certified by the Department of Justice, and briefed to and supported by bipartisan leadership of congressional intelligence oversight committees, shielded the people of the United States from harm and led to the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden.”

In response, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), the chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), the chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee, issued a joint statement (PDF) condemning the remarks made by Rodriguez and others — including former Attorney General Michael Mukasey and former CIA director Michael Hayden — who had leapt on the bandwagon as the anniversary of bin Laden’s death approached, calling them “inconsistent with CIA records,” and “misguided and misinformed,” and expressing their disappointment that “Mr. Rodriguez and others, who left government positions prior to the OBL operation and are not privy to all of the intelligence that led to the raid, continue to insist that the CIA’s so-called ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ used many years ago were a central component of our success.”

The statement, as the New York Times explained, “rebutted various claims that critical information about bin Laden’s courier” came from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed or from Abu Faraj al-Libi, another “high-value detainee,” seized in Pakistan in 2005, and held at Guantánamo, like Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other “high-value detainees,” since September 2006. In addition, the Times noted that the statement “rejected claims that tough treatment drew valuable information about bin Laden’s courier from a third detainee, unidentified in the statement,” but elsewhere identified as Hassan Ghul, another “high-value detainee,” seized in Iraq in 2004, who was never held at Guantánamo. The statement noted that, “While this third detainee did provide relevant information, he did so the day before he was interrogated by the CIA using their coercive interrogation techniques.”

“Instead,” the Times explained, Sens. Feinstein and Levin stated, without elaborating, that “the CIA learned of the existence of the courier, his true name and location through means unrelated to the CIA detention and interrogation program.”

This is significant, but what is needed now is for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence to complete its comprehensive review of the CIA’s former detention and interrogation program, and publish it. As the statement also explained, “Committee staff have reviewed more than 6 million pages of records and the Committee’s final report, which we expect to exceed 5000 pages, will provide a detailed, factual description of how interrogation techniques were used, the conditions under which detainees were held, and the intelligence that was — or wasn’t — gained from the program.”

As Dan Froomkin explained in the Huffington Post, the investigation by Democrats, which has taken nearly three years, and has involved Republican lawmakers refusing to take part, “concludes that records from the Bush administration fail to support claims that torture was effective in stopping any terrorist attack,” or in leading to the discovery and killing of Osama bin Laden last year.

While people like Jose Rodriguez remain free to peddle their lies and distortions about torture, and to profit from it, America’s name not only continues to be tarnished, but the American public also continue to be shamefully misled. The long-awaited report into the CIA’s torture program should be published as soon as possible, to let people know what really happened, and hopefully to play a part in tearing down the “golden shield” that has so far protected the Bush administration’s torturers from prosecution.

Andy Worthington, a regular contributor to The Public Record, is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison and the definitive Guantánamo prisoner list, published in March 2009. He maintains a blog at andyworthington.co.uk.

Former Office of Legal Counsel Acting Chief Steven Bradbury

An article in the July-Sept. 2004 edition of the journal Military Intelligence (PDF) sheds further light on the origins of the Army Field Manual (AFM) on interrogation, FM 2-22.3, HUMINT Collector Operations (PDF), that became operational in September 2006. The AFM became the de jure standard for government interrogations in the “Global War on Terror” as a matter of policy with the passing of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (DTA). Except, in 2005, the AFM was an earlier version.

By September 2006, the newer version included less restrictive controls on a number of questionable interrogation techniques, and had seriously lightened the restriction on the use of drugs in interrogations. It also included an annex to the manual, Appendix M, that was meant strictly for detainees not covered by Geneva POW protections, i.e., the detainees at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Appendix M allowed for the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation (as a “field expedient” method), and anticipated at least some use of environmental and diet “manipulations.”

But back in Summer 2004, Command Sergeant Major Lawrence J. Haubrich, U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corps, writing for the journal Military Intelligence (PDF) about military ethics in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib scandal, noted that the new AFM had already been vetted by Judge Advocate General corps’ [JAG] legal officials.

The DA [Dept. of the Army] Office of the JAG and JAG School reviewed each draft of FM 2-22.3, HUMINT Collector Operations, and each draft has been (and still is) in compliance with all Geneva Conventions, international agreements, and U.S. law. Additionally, the manual clarifies the responsibilities of HUMINT collectors and clearly delineates between HUMINT collection and other activities associated with internment operations. Finally, the manual now includes HUMINT collection techniques like strategic debriefing and elicitation as a result of the recent HUMINT and Counterintelligence Integrated Concept Team and lessons learned.

We can’t, of course, know what drafts the JAG officials had seen in 2004. We don’t know, for instance, whether or to what degree the techniques that ended up in the final document’s Appendix M were then included in the earlier drafts. The fact that the manual went through numerous iterations was noted in a couple of blog posts by Marcy Wheeler, who noted the existence of a little examined Bush-era Office of Legal Counsel memorandum (PDF) on the AFM and its Appendix M.

“The Department of Defense (“DOD”) has asked us to review for form and legality the revised drafts of the Army Field Manua1 2-22.3 (“Human Intelligence Collection Operations”), Appendix M of FM2-22.3 (“Restricted Interrogations Techniques”), and the Policy Directive regarding DOD’s Detainee Program,” Acting Attorney General Stephen Bradbury wrote in an April 13, 2006 “Memorandum for the Files.” Naturally, Bradbury found that Appendix M was “consistent with the requirements of the law, in particular with the requirements of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005…”

Wheeler noticed a couple of years ago, however, that the description of Appendix M in the Bradbury memorandum was not congruent with the version that was ultimately published.

Speaking of all those references to specific paragraphs of Appendix M, note that Bradbury wrote this memo on April 13, 2006. Appendix M was not finalized and released until September 6, 2006. And the contents of Appendix M changed significantly between the time Bradbury wrote his approval letter and the time the Appendix was put into effect five months latter…. Even the title changed–from the plural “Restricted Interrogation Techniques” to the singular “Restricted Interrogation Technique–Separation”….

A couple of examples of some of the changes Wheeler pointed out (bold emphases in original):

Bradbury cites M-23 for language limiting the use of Appendix M only to DOD interrogators specially trained and certified to use these techniques; that language now appears in M-22, but the paragraph now authorizes properly trained contract interrogators and “non-DOD personnel” to use the techniques as well.

Bradbury cites M-21 for medical limits, including that “Detainees determined to be unfit for interrogation may not be interrogated” (note, this does not appear to be a direct citation from the appendix, but rather Bradbury’s summary of it); in the current Appendix, language on medical oversight appears in several places (M-16, M-20, M-23, M-24, M-30), but never includes an explicit restriction against using the techniques on an unfit detainee….

Then, just last August, Wheeler noted this in a legal opinion issued in the Donald Vance/Nathan Ertel lawsuit against Donald Rumsfeld for the torture they suffered when falsely held prisoners in Iraq:

The plaintiffs contend that, after the enactment of the Detainee Treatment Act, Secretary Rumsfeld continued to condone the use of techniques from outside the Army Field Manual. ¶ 244. They allege that on the same day that Congress passed the Detainee Treatment Act in December 2005, Secretary Rumsfeld added ten classified pages to the Field Manual, which included cruel, inhuman, and degrading techniques, such as those allegedly used on the plaintiffs (the plaintiffs refer to this as “the December Field Manual”). Id. The defendants describe this allegation as speculative and untrue, but we must accept these well-pled allegations as true at the Rule 12(b)(6) stage of the proceedings.8

On appeal, the plaintiffs 8 cite a newspaper article reporting on the development of this classified set of interrogation methods. See Eric Schmitt, “New Army Rules May Snarl Talks with McCain on Detainee Issue,” New York Times (Dec. 14, 2005), available at http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/14/politics/14detain.html (last accessed Aug. 4, 2011) (“The Army has approved a new, classified set of interrogation methods… The techniques are included in a 10-page classified addendum to a new Army field manual…”). The plaintiffs contend that Secretary Rumsfeld eventually abandoned efforts to classify the Field Manual, but that the “December Field Manual” was in operation during their detention and was not replaced until September 2006, after plaintiffs had been released, when a new field manual (Field Manual 2-22.3) was instituted.

This is evidence of the likelihood that the changes to the AFM materially changed it from what the JAG officials vetted in 2004. Nevertheless, I don’t believe we have heard any protest or even a peep of protest from JAGs or other military legal sources over the AFM that was ultimately issued. The Bradbury memorandum itself is a deeply dishonest document, and relies heavily for its opinion on the earlier OLC memos by Yoo, Bybee, and Bradbury himself. In the memorandum, Bradbury cites the earlier OCL torture memos as having “previously concluded that techniques virtually identical to these [i.e., in Appendix M] are consistent with applicable U.S. legal obligations…”

He then refers readers to the July 14, 2004 testimony of Patrick F. Philbin before the House Select Committee on Intelligence (PDF). “There is no need to revisit those determinations here,” Bradbury wrote. But since the Obama administration withdrew by Executive Order (13491) “All executive directives, orders, and regulations… from September 11, 2001, to January 20, 2009, concerning detention or the interrogation of detained individuals,” where does that leave the legal assurances regarding Appendix M?

This question is of high importance as, even though numerous human rights organizations (Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Amnesty International, Open Society Foundations, and others) have expressed grave misgivings about the abuse inherent in the current Army Field Manual instructions, the government, including key Democrats on the Intelligence and Armed Services committees, and the Obama administration itself, support the current AFM as the relevant and sufficient standard for all U.S. government military and CIA interrogations.

The inadequacy of the Bradbury memorandum in vetting “legal” techniques for interrogation, techniques said to be “Geneva compliant” is laughably belied by the fact that four of the six “restricted interrogation techniques” discussed by Bradbury are redacted in the declassified release of the memorandum. Truly, the government must think we can’t see what is right before our eyes.

Additionally, of the two techniques openly discussed — “Mutt and Jeff” (Good cop/Bad cop) and “False Flag — both were ultimately incorporated into the main text of the final AMF draft. Even though the other techniques were left unclassified in the final version, the government still censors the techniques Bradbury was describing in his 2006 memo.

In a particularly Bradburyian moment of bad conscience, or possibly only to cover his ass, the former top Bush lawyer remarks in a footnote, the “six restricted interrogation techniques” might not satisfy the DTA if used on “all DoD detainees” (italics in original). Even more: “Nor does our analysis suggest that these techniques would be lawful if used in the criminal justice process as a means of obtaining information about ordinary crimes.”

Hence we can see the result of the Bush-Gonzales-Yoo removal of the GWOT detainees from protected POW status soon after 9/11. Since Appendix M is still used in interrogations, we must conclude the Obama administration has never withdrawn the order that removed Al Qaeda/Taliban and associated prisoners from Geneva protections. Or has the administration has issued new opinions that have never been made public?

It must not matter to the Congressional oversight mavens, who have said not a peep about these issues, and continue to push the AFM and Appendix M. Nor does the proud JAG corps, who in some cases were known to protest the torture as it unfolded at Guantanamo, or the unfairness of the “Star Chamber” military commissions process, have any update I know of from their early stamp of approval given to the AFM.

One could not hope for much from a government that slaughtered two million Indochinese, and was never held accountable for that and many crimes that followed. It may be tilting at windmills to believe that the ongoing use of torture, even as one version of it is enshrined now in a formal military document, would become a matter of some social protest or media condemnation. This is a society and a nation totally adrift in a sea of moral nihilism when it comes to military and intelligence matters.

Jeffrey Kaye, a psychologist living in Northern California and a regular contributor to Truthout and The Public Record, blogs about civil liberties and issues revolving around the US government’s torture program at The Dissenter. He can be reached at sfpsych at gmail dot com. Follow Jeff on Twitter: @Jeff_Kaye

In cooperation with Author/Journalist Douglas Valentine, Cryptocomb is publishing over 8GB’s of audio recordings that Mr. Valentine collected throughout his personal interviews with former CIA and U.S. Military Officers while researching for his book, “The Phoenix Program”. The Phoenix Program for the unacquainted was a CIA generated operation that sponsored mass arrests, terrorism, torture, murder and lies during the war in Vietnam. Many of the players went on to walk the halls of the Pentagon, Congress, the Department of Homeland Security, and major National Security Corporations.

Cryptocomb noted that the Phoenix Program “is the template for the targeted killings in the war on terror.” Valentine, the author of the groundbreaking book, “The Phoenix Program,” also made Phoenix Program documents available at Cryptocomb. On his website, Valentine said the materials  “show the development of ‘targeted kills,’ ‘administrative detention’ and ‘High Value’ rewards programs, among other things relevant to the eternal war on terror and Homeland Security.”

The interview Valentine conducted with William Colby, the former director of CIA who was chief of station in Vietnam who ran the agency’s covert operations in Southeast Asia, about the program is chilling.

In May of 2002, one of several meetings was convened at the White House where the CIA sought permission from top Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, to torture the agency’s first high-value detainee captured after 9/11: Abu Zubaydah.

The CIA claimed Zubaydah, who at the time was being held at a black site prison in Thailand, was “withholding imminent threat information during the initial interrogation sessions,” according to documents released by the Senate Intelligence Committee in April 2009.

So, “attorneys from the CIA’s Office of General Counsel [including the agency's top lawyer John Rizzo] met with the Attorney General [John Ashcroft], the National Security Adviser [Rice], the Deputy National Security Adviser [Stephen Hadley], the Legal Adviser to the National Security Council [John Bellinger], and the Counsel to the President [Alberto Gonzales] in mid-May 2002 to discuss the possible use of alternative interrogation methods that differed from the traditional methods used by the U.S.”

One of the key documents handed out to Bush officials at this meeting, and at Principals Committee sessions chaired by Rice that took place between May and July 2002, was a 37-page instructional manual that contained detailed descriptions of seven of the ten techniques that ended up in the legal opinion widely referred to as the “torture memo,” drafted by Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) attorney John Yoo and signed by his boss, Jay Bybee, three months later. According to Rice, Yoo had attended the Principals Committee meetings and participated in discussions about Zubaydah’s torture.

That instructional manual, referred to as “Pre-Academic Laboratory (PREAL) Operating Instructions,” has just been released by the Department of Defense under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The document sheds additional light on the origins of the Bush administration’s torture policy and for the first time describes exactly what methods of torture Bush officials had discussed – and subsequently approved – for Zubaydah in May 2002.

If there were a Nobel Prize for Tenacity, I would nominate half a dozen organizations that, in the face of years of lost court cases and rapidly graying hair, continue to seek justice for some of the most egregious victims of the Bush/Obama “war on terror.”

These legal bulldogs keep getting their lawsuits bounced out of one federal court after another – and keep coming back for more. They have names like the American Civil Liberties Union, Human Rights First, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty USA, and literally hundreds of others.

Consider this: The despicable practice of “extraordinary rendition” began in the Clinton Administration, expanded during the eight years of George W. Bush, and remains alive and well under President Obama.

At its most fundamental level, extraordinary rendition means the CIA kidnaps people it believes are terrorism suspects and ships them off, drugged and blindfolded, to the CIA’S own secret prisons or those operated by allied countries who have long and well-documented histories of systematically torturing prisoners.

For years, small groups of people who have survived the waterboarding and the electric shocks and the sleep deprivation have, with the help of human rights organizations, filed lawsuits against the US government, seeking to hold top American policy-makers accountable for their years of pain.

And each time the survivors bring such an action, the courthouse doors are slammed in their faces. Typically, the government invokes what is known as the “State Secrets Privilege.” This once-little-used legal quirk holds that disclosure of any of the secret evidence would compromise national security.

Some lawmakers have been discussing in committees revisions to this statute since the beginning of the Obama Administration, but no one has taken any action despositive whatever.

Consequently, not a single victim of the “war on terror” has had the opportunity to tell his story in a court of law and not a single senior US official has been held accountable.

Who are these victims who keep banging on the courthouse doors?

Here are three of the most prominent:

Jeppesen DataPlan is a subsidiary of The Boeing Company, and specializes in flight planning and logistical support services for aircraft and crews, including those used by the CIA to transport victims to U.S.-run prisons or foreign intelligence agencies overseas, where they were subjected to harsh interrogation techniques and torture.

In the Jeppesen case, five British residents – all of whom were imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay – sued Jeppesen for assisting the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) with logistics for the flights to Afghanistan and CIA secrets prisons where they were held incommunicado and tortured. The men claim they were victims of the U.S. “extraordinary rendition” program – and that Jeppesen was complicit in the process.

The judge rejected the ACLU’s claim that “abundant evidence” was already in the public domain, including a sworn affidavit by a former Jeppesen employee and flight records confirming Jeppesen’s involvement.

The ACLU appealed the case all the way to the Supreme Court, which declined to hear it.

Maher Arar: A Canadian citizen born in Syria, Arar was passing through Kennedy International Airport in New York on his way home in 2002 when he was detained by Customs officials. He was suspected of being a terrorist.

Subsequently he was flown against his will, first, to Jordan, then to Syria, where he was jailed by Syrian intelligence. In the year following, he was tortured, forced to falsely confess to attending an al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan, and then released after a year without ever being charged with anything.

With the help of the Center for Constitutional Rights and renowned Constitutional lawyer David Cole, Arar sued former Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller, and then Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, as well as numerous US immigration officials, challenging the rendition of a Canadian citizen to Syria, by the US government.

In his suit, Arar accused the government of violating his constitutional right to due process, as well as his right to choose a country of removal other than one in which he would be tortured. That particular right, as well as his rights under international law, are guaranteed under the Torture Victims Protection Act.

Arar’s lawyers, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), charged that Arar’s Fifth Amendment due process rights were violated when he was confined without access to an attorney or the court system, both domestically before being rendered, and while detained by the Syrian government, whose actions were complicit with the U.S.

Additionally, CCR claimed the Attorney General and INS officials who carried out his deportation also likely violated his right to due process by recklessly subjecting him to torture at the hands of a foreign government that they had every reason to believe would carry out abusive interrogation.

Arar also filed a claim under the Torture Victims Protection Act, adopted by the U.S. Congress in 1992, which allows a victim of torture by an individual of a foreign government to bring suit against that actor in U.S. Court.

Arar’s claim under the Act against Ashcroft and the INS directors is based upon their complicity in bringing about the torture he suffered.

But the Canadian Government took a very different approach. It convened a blue-ribbon panel to investigate the Arar incident. After a two-year probe, the Canadian government admitted it had made a serious mistake in the information it had supplied to the US on Arar. The head of the Canadian Royal Mounted Police was forced to resign, and Canada issues a formal apology to Arar and awarded him $10 million.

The US Government has steadfastly refused to even discuss the case, much less apologize. At a Congressional hearing soon after 9/11, then Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice acknowledged that the Arar case “wasn’t handled very well,” but came nowhere close to apologizing to anyone for anything.

Well, the human rights lawyers who bring these cases to court are, as one told me, “frustrated but ever-hopeful.”

It is that ever-hopeful quality that is now pressing ACLU lawyers to try yet another legal step. Denied their day in court by US Federal Judges, three Afghans and three Iraqis who say they were tortured while held by the American military at detention centers in Iraq and Afghanistan have filed a petition against the US with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IAHCR).

The men were part of a group who in 2005 sued then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and three senior military officials in federal court for torture and abuse. That case was summarily dismissed on immunity grounds before reaching the merits.

The current petition is equivalent to an international legal complaint. It asks the commission, which is an independent human rights body of the Organization of American States, to conduct a full investigation into the human rights violations and seeks an apology on behalf of the six men from the US government.

The ACLU claims that between 2003 and 2004, the men were detained in U.S.-run detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq, where they were subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment including severe and repeated beatings, cutting with knives, sexual humiliation and assault, mock executions and prolonged restraint in excruciating positions the petition charges. None of the men were ever charged with a crime.

“I think that I and the many others who suffered unfairly at the hands of the American government deserve justice,” said petitioner Ali Hussein, an Iraqi who was a 17-year-old high school student when he was detained and abused by American soldiers. “We want America to admit that what happened to us was wrong and should never be allowed to happen again to anyone anywhere.”

Hussein, who is now a law student, was shot in the neck and back before being arrested. He said that military personnel refused to provide him medical care for several hours, and when the bullets were eventually removed the procedure was done without anesthetic. He was then denied food, water and pain medication for almost two days after he was shot.

The petition states, “The US government’s own reports document that the torture and inhumane treatment that Petitioners were subjected to was not aberrational; on the contrary, it was widespread and systemic throughout the US-run detention facilities in the two countries. These same reports also document that the torture and inhumane treatment of detainees were the direct result of policies and practices promulgated and implemented at the highest levels of the US government.

The ACLU charged that “despite these reports and Petitioners’ and other detainees’ credible allegations of torture and inhumane treatment, the US government has failed to conduct any comprehensive criminal investigation, has not held accountable those responsible, and has not provided any form of redress to Petitioners and the many other victims and survivors of US torture and abuse.”

It added: “Since a remedy for these men has been denied in American courts, these six courageous men are seeking to hold the US government accountable on the world stage,” said Steven Watt, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Human Rights Program.

“No high-ranking government officials have yet been held to account for their actions, and this petition seeks to do just that and to ensure that the government respects basic human rights, including the right of everyone to be free from torture and inhumane treatment.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs in the Middle East and elsewhere for the US State Department and the US Agency for International Development. He served in the international affairs area in the Kennedy Administration and now writes on subjects ranging from human rights to foreign affairs for a number of newspapers and online journals.

MP3 here. (19:30)

The United States government subjected Bradley Manning to cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment following his arrest in May 2010 in Iraq on suspicion of leaking hundreds of thousands of secret State Department cables and other documents to WikiLeaks, the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Torture concluded in a long-awaited report.

In an addendum to a report presented to the UN General Assembly on the protection of human rights, Juan Méndez wrote that “imposing seriously punitive conditions of detention on someone who has not been found guilty of any crime is a violation of his right to physical and psychological integrity as well as of his presumption of innocence.”

Méndez told The Guardian UK Monday, “If the effects in regards to pain and suffering inflicted on Manning were more severe, they could constitute torture.”