Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki. Photo/Wikimedia.

Human Rights Watch is charging that, despite U.S. government assurances that it helped create a stable democracy, the reality is that it left behind a “budding police state” —  cracking down harshly during 2011 on freedom of expression and assembly by intimidating, beating, and detaining activists, demonstrators, and journalists.

The organization’s Middle East and North Africa director, Sarah Leah Whitson, warns that “Iraq is quickly slipping back into authoritarianism as its security forces abuse protesters, harass journalists, and torture detainees.”

Its World Report 2012 attributes the downward trajectory to the security services of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki” and armed gangs.

The report notes that in February, HRW “uncovered a secret detention facility controlled by elite security forces who report to the military office of the Prime Minister. The report added, “The same elite divisions controlled Camp Honor, a separate facility in Baghdad where detainees were tortured with impunity.”

The 676-page report report says, “Given the violent forces resisting the “Arab Spring,” the international community has an important role to play in assisting the birth of rights-respecting democracies in the region.”

The report documents a wide range of human rights abuses. For example, it says, “In the weeks before the last convoy of US troops left Iraq on December 18, Iraqi security forces rounded up hundreds of Iraqis accused of being former Baath Party members, most of whom remain in detention without charge.”

The pullout of U.S. troops has been marked by an “apolitical crisis and a series of terrorist attacks targeting civilians that have rocked the country.” But Iraqi-on-Iraqi violence is not new and is unconnected to the US exit. A number of US Embassy cables released by Wikileaks refer to the torture of prisoners in Iraqi custody and of knowledge of some of it by US troops.

The annual report, which covers the state of human rights in some 90 countries, says that, during nationwide demonstrations in Iraq to “protest widespread corruption and demand greater civil and political rights,” security forces “violently dispersed protesters, killing at least 12 on February 25, and injuring more than 100. Baghdad security forces beat unarmed journalists and protesters that day, smashing cameras and confiscating memory cards.”

Earlier in the year, “in one of the worst incidents, government-backed thugs armed with wooden planks, knives, and iron pipes, beat and stabbed peaceful protesters and sexually molested female demonstrators as security forces stood by and watched, sometimes laughing at the victims,” the report charges.

In May, the report says, the Council of Ministers approved a Law on the Freedom of Expression of Opinion, Assembly, and Peaceful Demonstration, which “authorizes officials to restrict freedom of assembly to protect ‘the public interest’ and in the interest of ‘general order or public morals.’ This law still awaits parliamentary approval.

HRW comments that freedom of expression fared little better as “security forces routinely abused journalists covering demonstrations, using threats, arbitrary arrests, beatings, and harassment, and confiscating or destroying their equipment.”

On September 8, the report says, “An unknown assailant shot to death Hadi al-Mahdi, a popular radio journalist often critical of government corruption and social inequality, at his home in Baghdad. Immediately before his death, HRW says al-Mahdi had received several phone and text message threats not to return to Baghdad’s Tahrir Square, which was the focal point for the weekly demonstrations.”

Earlier, after attending the February 25 “Day of Anger” mass demonstration, security forces arrested, blindfolded, and severely beat him and three other journalists during a subsequent interrogation,” HRW says.

In January 2012, HRW says it “observed that Iraqi authorities had successfully curtailed the Tahrir Square anti-government demonstrations by
flooding the weekly protests with pro-government supporters and undercover security agents. Dissenting activists and independent journalists for the most part said that they no longer felt safe attending the demonstrations.”

The report continues, “Prison brutality, including torture in detention facilities, was a major problem throughout the year. In February, Human Rights Watch uncovered, within the Camp Justice military base in Baghdad, a secret detention facility controlled by elite security forces who report to al-Maliki’s military office.”

Beginning in late 2010, the report charges, Iraqi authorities transferred more than 280 detainees to the facility, which was controlled by the Army’s 56th Brigade and the Counter-Terrorism Service.

HRW added that “the same elite divisions controlled Camp Honor, a separate facility in Baghdad where detainees were tortured with impunity. More than a dozen former Camp Honor detainees told Human Rights Watch that detainees were held incommunicado and in inhumane conditions, many for months at a time. Detainees said interrogators beat them; hung them upside down for hours at a time; administered electric shocks to various body parts, including the genitals; and repeatedly put plastic bags over their heads until they passed out from asphyxiation.”

HRW also weighed in on the human rights situation in Iraqi Kurdistan. In what it called the “Silenced Spring,” HRW’s Samer Muscati recounts that  the Kurdistan Regional Government “promised a new era of freedom for Iraqi Kurds, but it seems no more respectful of Kurdish rights to free speech than the government that preceded it.”

He added, “In a time when the Middle East is erupting in demands to end repression, the Kurdish authorities are trying to stifle and intimidate critical journalism.”

In March, Human Rights Watch interviewed more than 20 journalists in Kurdistan covering the protests and found that security forces and their proxies routinely repress journalists through threats, arbitrary arrests, beatings, and harassment, and by confiscating and destroying their equipment.

And Iraqi authorities appear to be pulling no punches. Zana Ali Ghazi, 32, a reporter for the Kurdistan News Network (KNN), a satellite television channel affiliated with the Kurdish opposition party, Goran, said that while he was trying to report on a protest in the city of Saeed Sadiq on March 15, “eight armed men, some in uniform, cracked three of his ribs and beat him with wooden clubs and Kalashnikovs until he lost consciousness. ‘They told me that if I continued to cover this type of news, they would kill me’,” Ghazi told HRW.

Kurdistan authorities have repeatedly tried to silence Livin Magazine, one of Iraqi Kurdistan’s leading independent publications, and other media. The international community should end its silence and condemn these widening
attacks, Human Rights Watch said.

A Livin reporter told Human Rights Watch that when he called the Minister of Peshmerga (Kurdistan security forces), on April 24, the minister threatened Livin’s editor, Mira, with death. The reporter says the conversation is on tape but that no one from the Iraqi authorities had made any move to investigate.

In Sulaimaniya on the night of May 11, security forces detained and beat a Kurdistan News Network reporter, Bryar Namiq, breaking his hand.

In Arbil, two journalists, who HRW says are afraid to be named for fear of reprisal, charged that on May 18 eight men in civilian clothes chased after them in late April. The men appeared in two vehicles on the street just before the journalists were supposed to meet with a regional official who had asked for a meeting with some members of the media.

HRW says the journalists believe that the men were plainclothes security forces who were aware of the meeting and were trying to kidnap them.

The HRW Report says that Soran Umar, a protest organizer and freelance journalist, has been in hiding since April 19. “I have not slept at home since then,” he told Human Rights Watch on May 17. “My sin is that I am criticizing the undemocratic acts of KRG and the two ruling parties, that is all. The security forces have tried to kidnap me, and they have ordered my arrest. They even tried to kidnap my son.”

These examples appear to be a small fraction of abuses carried out by Iraqi government authorities against journalists — Reporters Without Borders has tallied 44 physical attacks against media workers and outlets and 23 arrests.

Which prompted this thought from HRW’s Sarah Leah Whitson: “Eight years after the United States removed Saddam Hussein in the name of protecting the rights of Kurds, it is standing by silently as the government it helped to install in Kurdistan abuses and represses the population. US President Obama noted in his speech on May 20 the flourishing democracy in Iraq, but the reality is that government-sponsored fear and repression continue to fester there.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

This picture of Abu Zubaydah was included in his classified Guantanamo Detainee Assessment Brief released last month by WikiLeaks.

This exclusive report was originally published by Truthout on March 30, 2010. It was written by investigative reporter Jason Leopold.

The Justice Department has quietly recanted nearly every major claim the Bush administration made about Abu Zubaydah the alleged al-Qaeda leader who was the first suspected terrorist subjected to the torture of waterboarding and other White House-approved “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

In a federal court filing, Justice backed away from the Bush administration’s statements that Zubaydah was the No. 2 or No. 3 official in al-Qaeda who had helped plan the 9/11 attacks, as well as even earlier claims from the Clinton administration that he was directly involved in planning the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa.

The US government’s retreat underscores yet another problem with President George W. Bush’s use of torture. Besides its illegality and immorality, torture can be applied to suspected terrorists who have been falsely identified and who thus don’t possess the expected information, which can lead frustrated interrogators to escalate the torture until the subject provides something, whether true or not.

Such false expectations appear to have been a factor in the case of Zubaydah, who was captured in Pakistan on March 28, 2002. He appeared to respond cooperatively to FBI interrogators using “rapport-building” techniques, but his failure to supply details that the CIA had anticipated led the agency to obtain high-level permission to subject him to the near-drowning experience of waterboarding and other torture techniques.

After those techniques were cleared by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel in mid-summer 2002 – and were sanctioned by Vice President Dick Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials – CIA interrogators applied the methods to Zubaydah In their frustration, they ultimately waterboarded him 83 times before concluding that many of his claims of ignorance were truthful.

In recent months, former Bush speechwriter Marc Thiessen has been on a public relations campaign promoting his book, “Courting Disaster,” in which he defended the torture of Zubaydah, claiming that he reviewed classified intelligence that revealed Zubaydah’s torture produced actionable intelligence that thwarted imminent plots against the United States.

The Justice Department has now backed away from the Bush administration’s more extreme claims in a 109-page court document filed in US District Court in Washington last September in response to 213 discovery requests from Zubaydah’s attorneys in his habeas corpus case, which demands evidence to support his continued detention at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

In the filing, the Justice Department asked the judge presiding over the case to deny virtually every discovery request sought by Zubaydah’s attorneys, explaining, in some instances, that the US government no longer relied upon the explosive allegations that President Bush and other top officials made about Zubaydah after he was captured and tortured in 2002.

For instance, the document refutes Bush’s direct statements about Zubaydah, including a claim that he was one of al-Qaeda’s “top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States.”

For the first time, the government officially admitted that Zubaydah did not have “any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” and was neither a “member” of al-Qaeda nor “formally” identified with the terrorist organization.

Retreat’s Impact

The government’s retreat also could add to the mounting criticism of US Appeals Court Judge Jay Bybee, who in August 2002 as head of the Office of Legal Counsel signed memos authorizing the torture techniques that were applied to Zubaydah and other “high-value” detainees.

At the time, Bybee asserted, based on information he received from the CIA, that Zubaydah “is one of the highest ranking members of the al-Qaeda terrorist organization,” “has been involved in every major terrorist  operation  carried out by  al-Qaeda,” and was “one of the planners of  the September 11 attacks.” Bybee approved the harsh interrogation as necessary to thwart pending attacks on US interests, which the CIA claimed Zubaydah knew about.

While backing away from the extravagant claims of the Bush era, the Obama administration says Zubaydah should still be detained based on his “actions” as an “affiliate” of al-Qaeda.

The Justice Department filing alleged that Zubaydah “supported enemy forces and participated in hostilities” and “facilitat[ed] the retreat and escape of enemy forces” after the US invaded Afghanistan in October 2001.

The government acknowledged that its case against Zubaydah is based entirely on the first six volumes of his diaries that he wrote beginning in 1992 and an undated “propaganda video [Zubaydah] recorded before his capture in which [he allegedly] appears on camera expressing solidarity with Usama Bin Laden and al-Qaida.”

The government’s new charges, according to the court filing, include allegations that “[Zubaydah] was present in [the Afghan city of] Kandahar in November 2001, and a number of prominent terrorist figures converged on Kandahar around the same time,” including self-professed 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But the government does not “specify whether any of these figures met during that that time period.”

Zubaydah’s attorneys say the new allegations are baseless and have asked the government for “evidence that would undermine an ‘insinuation that [Zubaydah's] presence in Kandahar … was related to the presence of known terrorists in the city’ is vague and insufficiently specific and is not supported by any allegations about whether [Zubaydah] in fact was present in Kandahar or for what purpose.”

Zubaydah’s attorneys claim that “the persons whom [Zubaydah] assisted in escaping Afghanistan in 2001 included ‘women, children, and/or other non-combatants’” and that the government has evidence to support those assertions. The lawyers also questioned the government’s history of falsehoods about their client.

“The Government’s accounts frequently have been at variance with the actual facts, and the government has generally been loath to provide the facts until forced to do so,” said Zubaydah’s attorney, Brent Mickum, in an interview.

“When the Government was forced to present the facts in the form of discovery in Zubaydah’s case, it realized that the game was over and there was no way it could support the Bush administration’s baseless allegations. So it changed the charges.”

No Formal Allegiance

In seeking to block Zubaydah’s discovery motions, the Justice Department also said the government was no longer contending that Zubaydah “was a ‘member’ of al-Qaida in the sense of having sworn bavat (allegiance) or having otherwise satisfied any formal criteria that either [Zubaydah] or al-Qaida may have considered necessary for  inclusion in al-Qaeda.

“Nor is the government detaining [Zubaydah] based on any allegation that [Zubaydah] views himself as part of al-Qaida as a matter of subjective personal conscience, ideology or worldview. Rather, [the government's] detention of [Zubaydah] is based on conduct and actions that establish [Zubaydah] was ‘part of’ hostile forces and ‘substantially supported’ those forces.”

That retreat contradicts initial claims made by senior Bush administration officials, including Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, who described Zubaydah as a “close associate of [Osama bin Laden], and if not the number two, very close to the number two person in the organization. I think that’s well established.”

Even after Zubaydah’s interrogators apparently apologized to him for that mistaken impression – at his Combatant Status Review Tribunal hearing, Zubaydah said “they told me sorry we discover that you are not number three [in al-Qaeda], not a partner, even not a fighter” – the Bush administration continued to hype his role.

John Bellinger, legal adviser to Secretary of  State Condoleezza Rice, said during a June 2007 briefing about Guantanamo Bay detainees that Zubaydah, who was transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, helped  plan the 9/11 attacks and was “extremely dangerous.”

But the Justice Department now says “the Government has not contended in this [habeas] proceeding that [Zubaydah] had any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, so [to] the extent that this request seeks information ‘tending to show … that [Zubaydah] did not know of the planned attacks of 9/11′, the request seeks evidence about contentions the Government has not made.”

The Justice Department also asked US District Court Judge Richard Roberts, who is presiding over the  habeas case, to deny defense requests for evidence that would “undermine”  government claims that Zubaydah worked on bin Laden’s “military and security plan to confront  an American counterattack” in Khost,  Afghanistan, after 9/11.

“The Government does not rely on any contention that [Zubaydah] did this work as an ‘al-Qaida’ deputy or because he was subject to al-Qaida command,” according to the court document.

Blocking a KSM Interview

And the Justice Department opposed Zubaydah’s lawyers’ request to question Khalid Sheikh Mohammed about whether he met Zubaydah, when the two were allegedly in Kandahar at the same time in November 2001.

“It is difficult to imagine how any answer from Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would substantially help [Zubadyah],” the government filing said. “Even if Khalid Sheikh Mohammed were to say he did not meet with Petitioner while they were in Kandahar, the fact that [Zubaydah's] presence in Kandahar coincided with the presence of major terrorist figures in Kandahar would still weigh in favor of [his continued] detention.”

According to lawyer Mickum, the government’s “entirely new position” about Zubaydah was revealed last year to in a 44-page Factual Return that included more than 2,000 pages of exhibits.

“I’m not surprised at all that the Government has dropped the old charges against our client and is alleging new charges against him,” Mickum said in an interview. “That is their tried-and-true modus operandi. That’s exactly what they did with my client Bisher al Rawi. He was initially charged with associating with a known al-Qaeda figure in London.

“Unfortunately, Bisher was associating with him at the express request of Britain’s MI5 [intelligence service]. After we established that he [Bisher] worked for MI5, the US simply changed the charges against him, alleging that he had terrorist training in Bosnia and Afghanistan.

“Once again, we were able to show those charges were utterly bogus when we proved that Bisher had never left England from 1998 until his fateful business trip to Africa, where he was arrested by the CIA, rendered to the ‘Dark Prison’ in Afghanistan and tortured, tortured at Bagram Air Force base and tortured in Guantanamo.

“What all these cases have in common is torture, and [Zubaydah's] case has that in spades. Given, the government’s history, it is not likely they would simply let him go and apologize. No, when their case falls apart, they re-jigger the evidence, and come up with new charges and [say] ‘we will defend the new charges with the same zeal we defended the earlier bogus charges.’”

Zubaydah’s attorneys argued in his initial petition for habeas corpus filed in February 2008 that he was not a member of al-Qaeda, that he had no knowledge of any terrorist operations, and that the military camp he was alleged to be affiliated with, Khaldan, was closed by the Afghan Taliban after refusing to let it go under the formal control of bin Laden and al-Qaeda.

“We have never deviated from that position, and now the government admits that we were correct all along,” Mickum said.

Indeed, the Justice Department’s response agrees that Khaldan was “organizationally and operationally independent” of al-Qaeda’s camps. The filing also backed off other claims made by Bush administration officials that Zubaydah knew the identities of specific individuals who trained at Khaldan and later went on to al-Qaeda-operated camps and allegedly took part in terrorist activities.

“The Government has not contended in this proceeding that Petitioner selected or knew the identities of specific persons who were selected to leave Khaldan for training at al-Qaida camps,” the filing states.

Undermining 9/11 Report

The US government’s new position also undercuts the 9/11 Commission’s report as it relates to Zubaydah. The report called him the leader of Khaldan.

The 9/11 report added that Zubaydah was a “major figure” in the “Millennium plot,” claiming he was a mastermind behind a plan to bomb a hotel in Jordan and Los Angeles International Airport.

The 9/11 report cited several  intelligence memoranda from then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke that Zubaydah was planning “a series of major terrorist attacks” on Israeli and possibly US targets and was working closely with bin Laden. Clarke declined numerous requests for comment.

Terrorist suspicions about Zubaydah predated the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, in the infamous Aug. 6, 2001, Presidential Daily Brief titled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US,” he was identified as bin Laden’s “lieutenant” and alleged to have “helped facilitate” the plot to detonate a bomb at LAX.

FBI officials obtained that information from Ahmed Ressam, who was convicted in the LAX plot in April 2001. In exchange for a lighter sentence, Ressam cooperated with the government and identified alleged terrorists, including Zubaydah, who Ressam said was a key figure in al-Qaeda, ran Khaldan and had close connections to bin Laden. Ressam also said Zubdaydah told him in 1998 that, independent of bin Laden, he was preparing his own attack against the United States. Ressam later recanted his statements.

When asked about what the 9/11 Commission was told regarding Zubaydah, Mickum suggested that the panel was lied to by the CIA.

“After torturing our client, the CIA knew he was never a member of al-Qaeda and that he had no knowledge of any al-Qaeda terrorist activities,” Mickum said. “And this fact was confirmed after other members of al-Qaeda like [Khalid Sheikh Mohammed] and the [alleged mastermind of the USS Cole bombing] al-Nashiri were tortured.”

In an interview last year, Jack Cloonan, a former FBI special agent assigned to the agency’s elite bin Laden unit, said the CIA and the Bush administration were flat wrong in designating Zubaydah as a top official in al-Qaeda.

“To cast him and describe him as the al-Qaeda emir or leader for the subcontinent or worse … I think was a mistake. … Based on his age and ethnicity, [he] would [n]ever be brought into the inner circle of al-Qaeda,” Cloonan said.

There was also the question of Zubaydah’s personality. “My partner had a chance to look at a lot of Abu Zubaydah’s diaries [which forms the basis of the government's case], poems and other things that he has written and he said that after reading this you just come away with the feeling that this is a guy who can’t be trusted or be given huge amounts of responsibility.”

Zubaydah began keeping a diary in 1992, after he suffered a severe head injury while fighting communist forces in Afghanistan. The injury left “significantly impaired both his long- and short-term memory,” states a Jan. 14, 2009, motion his attorneys filed related to his diaries.

“Long after his 1992 injury, once [Zubaydah] had recovered the ability to speak and write, he began to keep a diary. It is his memory. Without it, he is lost.”

The diary now appears to be the chief element of the US government’s remaining case against him.

Denied a visa was Richard Sollom, deputy president of the US-Based Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), who was hoping to attend the trial of doctors and nurses that treated injured protestors during months of unrest last year.

He left for Dubai, from where he told The Washington Post, “I am quite stunned. This was the first time a member of an international rights organization came to Bahrain after authorities promised to respect human rights and told us we can come and see for ourselves.

“We can see now that not much has changed,” he added.

Sollom thus became the second huan rights executive to be denied entry to Bahrain. Brian Dooley of Human Rights First, a major US-based human rights organization, applied for a visa but received a letter from Bahrain’s Minister for Human Rights and Social Development, Fatima Al Booshi, on January 11th suggesting he should delay his entry until the end of February.

In his reply, Dooley reminded the Minister that she told him on November 24th 2011 that non-government organizations (NGOs) would have access to Bahrain if they gave “five days’ notice of their arrival”. Brian informed the “Human Rights” Ministry of his proposed visit next week, on December 20th.

Bahrain’s Foreign Minister, Sheikh Khalid bin Ahmed bin Mohammed Al-Khalifa, also assured human rights groups that NGOs would have “unfettered access to Bahrain.”

In his letter to the Minister, Dooley also noted  that, at the release of the Bahrain Independent Commission of Inquiry (BICI) report in November, King Hamad had assured the world that ‘any Government which has a sincere desire for reform and progress understands the benefit of objective and constructive criticism,’ and that the day of the report of the BICI report ‘turns a new page of history.’ ”

Calling this a backward step for the Kingdom, Faisal Fulad, President of the Bahrain Human Rights Society (BHRWS), said: “His Majesty the King has made it clear that Bahrain has nothing to hide when he opened the country up to the world in October, facing the truth of an independent commission which reported last year’s democratic protests.”

He added: “So why are we now back to this? By not allowing a human rights activist to enter the kingdom, we are giving conflicting messages to the world that will now be asking, once again – is Bahrain a free and democratic country or not?”

He suggested a “return to an offer of talks put on the table last March” by the Crown Prince and the Deputy Supreme Commander.” Members of the opposition have made similar calls.

The Crown Prince had proposed a National Dialogue that included talks on seven key points: A parliament with full authority; a government that represents the will of the people; a review of naturalization; fair voting districts; the combating of corruption; state property; and addressing sectarian tension.

Bahrain’s King and his family are Sunni Arabs. Most of the Bahraini population consists of Shia Muslims and foreign workers. The Shias have long-standing complaints of discrimination against them in jobs, housing and social acceptance.

“Bahrain’s leadership has taken many brave steps forward in the last year to show that democracy is alive in the kingdom, but this move seems to take us back to stage one,” Fulad said, adding:

“I believe this is a time for the second phase of dialogue and to concentrate on HRH the Crown Prince’s seven points. At the same time, reforms should be stronger so that people will believe reform is happening.”

Meanwhile, human rights defenders, medics, students and others targeted by the Bahraini government in its crackdown on pro-democracy efforts continue to face abusive detention despite growing calls for their release.

One of those calls came from United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay called for the unconditional release of all Bahraini detainees imprisoned after a military trial. Human Rights First (HRF) noted that the Bahraini government had failed to comply with that request and, in fact, “is taking steps to delay the appeals of those accused.”

“Yesterday, a group of students from the University of Bahrain who were sentenced to 15 years each by the military court had their appeal hearing postponed until March. Five of them remain in Bahrain’s Jaw Prison,” said HRF’s Dooley.

“Their case and others like it make clear that Bahrain’s leaders are ignoring key calls for reform issued by Commissioner Pillay and even the Kingdom’s own Bassiouni Commission,” he said.

In addition to the students, the Bahrain regime continues to contest the appeals of others sentenced by the military court, including 20 medics who appear to have been prosecuted for treating injured protestors and telling the media about the nature and extent of injuries.

Dr. Nada Dhaif is one of the medics sentenced to 15 years after a trial in military court. Dr. Dhaif was summoned by the police for a four-hour interrogation on December 25.  During that interrogation, she was warned to keep a low profile, an apparent government response to her decision to speak with the media and human rights organizations about how she and others were tortured in detention.

Dr. Dhaif told Dooley, “I am being targeted for telling the world the continuing truth about Bahrain. Members of my family are also being harassed by the regime. I have only ever advocated peaceful reform but am being threatened for my human rights advocacy.”

Local human rights activists also report ongoing concerns about treatment in custody. Hassan Oun, aged 18, was rearrested today after speaking to a local human rights organization. During previous interrogations, Oun said he was raped by a security officer.

That officer allegedly later called Oun after his release and threatened to rearrest him and rape him until he died. According to Maryam Al Khawaja of the Bahrain Centre for Human Rights, Oun was recently arrested again in what she said was revenge against him for speaking to their center.

Every indication points away from the Royal Family’s willingness to engage in discussions of reform and reverse the variety of heinous human rights abuses committed by the country’s security apparatus.

For most democracies in the international community, the King’s double-dealing has triggered a profound sense of disappointment and betrayal. Hopes soared high when the King, in a first-of-a-kind move in the Middle East, commissioned and accepted a genuinely independent report prepared under the leadership of a distinguished judge from Egypt. That report found that Bahrain was guilty of unacceptable human rights violations, including widespread torture in detention.

The King urged dialogue. But that word is not being heard much these days. It seems obvious that His Highness is attempting to sandbag the world, stalling for time.

Meantime, little is being heard from the US, where President Obama finds himself between a rock and a hard place. Bahrain is of strategic importance to American interests, as it is not only a supplier of oil, but host to the US Fifth Fleet.

Bahrain has hired a small army of PR people in the US and the UK to promote the notion that the “unrest” is over. No need to worry about it anymore. These communications gurus also want to see the Bahrain Grand Prix, the Kingdom’s Formula One racing event, rescheduled. It was cancelled earlier because of the violence in the country.

But now, there is an opportunity for the folks who supervise Formula One to show the world that the unrest was never over and is far from being over now. Just last week, two children died from inhaling tear gas fired at them by the security forces.

Formula One can honor these children and demonstrate that there are things more important than money. Helping to ensure the basic rights of a people is surely one of those things. And if Bahrain really values Formula One for its tourism and economic development, that gives the organizers enormous leverage.

We need to urge them to use it.

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

What you may not know is that the US also tops the charts in the numbers of youth offenders serving life without parole sentences in adult US prisons. The score? The world: 0; the US: 2,570.

Right. The US is only country in the world that incarcerates people in adult prisons for crimes they committed when they were below the age of 18.

Furthermore, those prisoners experience conditions that violate fundamental human rights. That’s the depressing conclusion of a new study by Human Rights Watch, “Against All Odds: Prison Conditions for Youth Offenders Serving Life without Parole Sentences in the United States.”

Three months from now, in March, the US Supreme Court will consider the constitutionality of the life-without-parole sentence for youth offenders.

The 47-page report draws on six years of research, and interviews and correspondence with correctional officials and hundreds of youth offenders serving life without parole. Human Rights Watch found that nearly every youth offender serving life without parole reported physical violence or sexual abuse by other inmates or corrections officers. Nationwide statistics indicate that young prisoners serving any type of sentence in adult prison, as well as those with a slight build and low body weight, are most vulnerable to attack.

“Children who commit serious crimes and who inflict harm on others should be held accountable,” said Alison Parker, director of the US program at Human Rights Watch and co-author of the report. “But neither youth offenders, nor any other prisoner, should endure any form of physical abuse.” Most of the life-without-parole inmates have been convicted of homicide offenses.

“The penalty [of life without parole] forswears altogether the rehabilitative ideal…. For juvenile offenders, who are most in need of and receptive to rehabilitation, the absence of rehabilitative opportunities or treatment makes the disproportionality of the sentence all the more evident,” the report says.

This new research sheds light on the severity of prison conditions for those serving this sentence, Human Rights Watch said.

“Scared to death,” said a youth offender serving life without parole in California. “I was all of 5’6”, 130 pounds and they sent me to PBSP (Pelican Bay State Prison in California). I tried to kill myself because I couldn’t stand what the voices in my head was saying…. ‘You’re gonna get raped.’ ‘You won’t ever see your family again.’”

Youth offenders are serving life without parole sentences in 38 states and in federal prisons. They often enter adult prison while still children, although some have reached young adulthood by the time their trials end and they begin serving their sentences. Prison policies that channel resources to inmates who are expected to be released often result in denying youth serving life without parole opportunities for education, development, and rehabilitation, Human Rights Watch found.

Youth offenders commonly reported having thoughts of suicide, feelings of intense loneliness, or depression. Isolation was frequently compounded by solitary confinement. In the past five years, at least three youth offenders serving life without parole sentences in the United States have committed suicide.

The federal government and the states should abolish the sentence of life without parole for crimes committed by children, Human Rights Watch said. Government officials responsible for youth offenders should reform confinement conditions to accommodate their particular vulnerabilities, needs, and capacities to mature, reflect upon the harm they have caused, and change.

“Because children are different, shutting the door to growth, development, and rehabilitation turns a sentence of life without parole into a punishment of excessive cruelty,” said Parker. “Youth offenders should be given a path to rehabilitation while in prison – not forced to forfeit their future.”

Yet, lifers with the opportunity of parole (LWOP’s) experience a lack of educational opportunities. “LWOPs cannot participate in many rehabilitative, educational, vocational training or other assignments available to other inmates with parole dates…. The supposed rationality is that LWOPs are beyond salvagability and would just be taking a spot away from someone who will actually return to society someday,” the report says, quoting a youth offender serving life without parole in California.

Another inmate, this one in Arkansas, told Human Rights Watch (HRW), “I would be ever grateful… for the chance to spend my life now for some good reason. I would go to the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan…or jump on the first manned mission to Mars…. if the state were to offer me some opportunity to end my life doing some good, rather than a slow-wasting plague to the world, it would be a great mercy to me.”

The HRW report said, “Our research has found that youth offenders are among the inmates most susceptible to physical and sexual assault during their incarceration. Many are placed in isolated segregation to protect them or to punish them, some spending years without any but the most fleeting human contact.

Because of their sentence, youth offenders serving life without parole face the additional burden of being classified in ways that deprive them of meaningful opportunities while in prison. Many are denied access to educational and vocational programs available to other inmates. Finally, facing violence, stultifying conditions, and the prospect of lifelong separation from family and friends, many youth offenders experience depression and intense loneliness. Failed by prison mental health services, many contemplate and attempt suicide; some succeed.”

The report found that none of the 560 youthful offenders contacted by Human Rights Watch had managed to avoid violence in prison. When prison officials tolerate such violence, it constitutes a serious human rights abuse.

Youth offenders often spend significant amounts of their time in US prisons isolated from the general prison population. Such segregation can be an attempt to protect vulnerable youth offenders from the general population, to punish infractions of prison rules, or to manage particular categories of inmates, such as alleged gang members.

Youth offenders frequently described their experience in segregation as a profoundly difficult ordeal. Life in long-term isolation usually involves segregating inmates for 23 or more hours a day in their cells. Offenders contacted by Human Rights Watch described the devastating loneliness of spending their days alone, without any human contact, except for when a guard passes them a food tray through a slot in the door, or when guards touch their wrists.

HRW makes a series of recommendations to federal, state and local judges and prison officials. All are preceded by HRW’s longstanding call to state and federal governments to “abolish the life without parole sentence for all youth offenders and abolish the automatic trial of youth in adult criminal courts and their mandatory incarceration in adult prisons.”

William Fisher has managed economic development programs for the U.S. State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development in the Middle East, North Africa, Latin America, Asia and elsewhere for the past 25 years. He has supervised major multi-year projects for AID in Egypt, where he lived and worked for three years. He returned later with his team to design Egypt’s agricultural strategy. Fisher served in the international affairs area in the administration of President John F. Kennedy. He began his working life as a reporter and bureau chief for the Daytona Beach News-Journal and the Associated Press in Florida. He now reports on a wide-range of issues for a number of online journals.

Also, please read Jason Leopold’s recent report and watch the video interview he conducted with investigative journalist Joshua Phillips, author of “None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture,” who talked about his investigation into the 2004 death of Army Sgt. Adam Gray and how it led him to uncover a tragic story about torture’s other victims.

The Iraq war isn’t over.

For tens of thousands of soldiers returning from the battlefield, it never will be.

Some of these men and women will turn to alcohol and drugs to ease their mental injuries; some will end up homeless, unemployed and divorced. Some will commit suicide. Most will be forgotten.

That will be one of the lasting legacies of the nearly nine-year-long conflict.

Fortunately, there are journalists like Joshua Phillips who have taken great pains to preserve the memories of a handful of veterans whose lives have been ravaged by the war.

Phillips is the author of “None of Us Were Like This Before: American Soldiers and Torture,” a harrowing book about the torture of prisoners in Iraq and the deep psychological scars it left on the members of one battalion who dispensed pain to their victims.

In this compelling and heartrending on-camera interview, Phillips, who spent more than five years researching and writing “None of Us Were Like This Before,” discusses his investigation into the 2004 death of Army Sgt. Adam Gray, and how it led him to uncover a tragic story about torture’s other victims.

(Image: Lance Page / t r u t h o u t; Adapted: sunilgarg, kzappaster, ~Brenda-Starr~)

This report was written by Jason Leopold and originally published on Truthout

President Barack Obama would like the world to know that the US can do whatever it damn well pleases, thank you very much.

Obama also wants the whole, wide world to get this through its thick skull: only rogue governments that implement a policy of rendition, torture, indefinite detention and extrajudicial assassination are guilty of human rights abuses and should be held accountable.

That’s the clear-cut message Obama articulated late last Friday when he issued a proclamation commemorating the 63rd anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

“All people should live free from the threat of extrajudicial killing, torture, oppression and discrimination, regardless of gender, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation, or physical or mental disability,” Obama’s proclamation states.

Apparently, the Nobel Peace Prize-winning president doesn’t believe the indefinite detention of detainees at Guantanamo, especially those who have already been cleared for release; or the administration’s refusal to allow prisoners detained and tortured by the US government in Afghanistan, rises to the level of human rights abuses as outlined in his stunningly hypocritical proclamation. Nor does the former constitutional law professor believe that the extrajudicial killing of Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and propagandist Samir Kahn, US citizens accused of aiding terrorists who were assassinated without due process by a drone strike Obama personally authorized, is a human rights issue.

Obama’s proclamation also contained another embarrassing contradiction: it declared the week of December 10th as Human Rights Week, the same week Congress debated and is set to pass the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), a controversial piece of legislation that would give the president the power to indefinitely imprison without charge or trial or a court hearing anyone suspected of terrorist activity in the US.

On Wednesday, White House spokesman Jay Carney said Obama’s senior advisers would recommend to the president that he should not veto the bill, as Obama had promised to do, because Congress made minor changes Monday to the provisions in the legislation related to the treatment of terrorism suspects with which the administration is now satisfied.

When the US voted in favor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, it promised to uphold several ideals, including one that said, “no one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention, or exile.”

Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, said if Obama signs the bill, he will “go down in history as the president who enshrined indefinite detention without trial in US law.”

[UPDATE: The Senate passed the NDAA Thursday afternoon by a vote of 86-13, exactly 220 years to the day the Bill of Rights was ratified. The NDAA will now be sent to Obama where he is expected to sign it into law.]

Obama’s quagmire of contradictions on human rights is laid bare in a powerful and timely new book written by Juan Méndez, the United Nations Special Rapporteur For Torture and Marjory Wentworth, a Pushcart Prize-nominated poet, teacher and longtime human rights activist.

In “Taking A Stand: The Evolution of Human Rights,” Méndez and Wentworth interweave Méndez’s personal story as a lifelong human rights activist and lawyer into human rights themes.

“Each chapter is [centered] around a particular human rights issue, [Méndez's] role in shaping the dialogue around the issue and ideas for the future,” Wentworth said during an online book salon at Firedoglake two weeks ago hosted by this reporter.

Since his first days in office, Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have promoted the narrative that the US is a human rights leader. But as former Amnesty International Secretary General Ian Martin notes in his introduction to “Taking A Stand,” that assertion has been severely “undermined by [the US government's] inability to rise above political alliances and increasingly by its own direct violations of human rights.”

Obama has severely damaged the US’s standing in the world by refusing to investigate and prosecute the widespread human rights abuses that took place during George W. Bush’s tenure in office, Méndez said he has invited “other nations to follow the U.S. example of impunity for torture” and has provided “rogue regimes with a ready-made excuse for rejecting international community concerns about their own abuses,” Méndez and Wentworth write in a chapter devoted to accountability.

Méndez described Obama’s attitude, during the Firedoglake book salon, as a “twisted version of US exceptionalism,” where the “rules” only apply to “others.” Here’s a fresh example of that type of “twisted exceptionalism”: On Wednesday, the State Department announced that the US government had implemented sanctions against two Iranian officials for committing “serious human rights abuses,” including the indefinite detention of Iranian citizens, in connection with massive protests that took place in the country in 2009 over the disputed presidential election.

“This is the fourth time we have designated individuals and entities under human rights sanctioning authority” under a September 2010 executive order signed by Obama, said State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland, a former top aide to Dick Cheney who misled the media about the extent of the CIA’s rendition program and asserted that the Bush administration did not torture detainees. [h/t Jeffrey Kaye]

According to a State Department fact sheet issued in 2010, Iranian “protesters were detained without formal charges brought against them and during this detention detainees were subjected to beatings, solitary confinement and a denial of due process rights at the hands of [Iranian] intelligence officers….”

“In addition, political figures were coerced into making false confessions under unbearable interrogations, which included torture, abuse, blackmail and the threatening of family members,” the State Department’s fact sheet said.

Sound familiar? Under policies sanctioned by Bush, Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, war-on-terror detainees were imprisoned at secret, black site facilities and at Guantanamo Bay without formal charges brought against them. Those prisoners were also subjected to beatings, solitary confinement and a denial of due process rights and were coerced into making false confessions under unbearable interrogations, which included torture, abuse, blackmail and the threatening of family members.

Need another example of the administration’s “twisted version of American exceptionalism”? Last June, the White House issued a statement condemning Hamas for abducting Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit five years ago and holding “him hostage without access by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), in violation of the standards of basic decency and international humanitarian demands.”

“Abduction,” also known in US intelligence circles as “extraordinary rendition,” and hiding prisoners from the ICRC, sounds familiar as well. Of course it does, the latter was a policy enacted by Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and other former Bush officials. In fact, a January 2, 2004, memo drafted for military police and interrogators at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq and signed by Col. Marc Warren, the top legal adviser to Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, who was commander of US forces in Iraq, was entitled “New plan to restrict Red Cross access to Abu Ghraib.” The contents of that memo have never been released.

Moreover, in 2004, Rumsfeld admitted that at the request of then-CIA Director George Tenet, he authorized the US military in the fall of 2003 to hide an Iraqi prisoner from the ICRC and other organizations that monitor the treatment of prisoners.

Rumsfeld told reporters at a June 17, 2004, press briefing that Tenet sent him a letter asking the US military to imprison the Iraqi who was believed to be a high-ranking member of Ansar al-Islam, a Kurdish terrorist group suspected of links to al-Qaeda. Tenet further told Rumsfeld to be sure the detainee was kept off the prisoner rolls, which he was for six months.

The White House’s decision to weigh in on Shalit, who Hamas has since released, is another example of the Obama administration’s contradictory stance on human rights whenever Israel’s track record is raised.

In their book, Méndez and Wentworth documented Israel’s own human rights abuses, and they were critical that the US condemned a report of a United Nations investigative team led by Richard Goldstone regarding Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in Gaza. Méndez said he cannot explain why “Israel is generally shielded from effective action on human rights,” by the US, but he does not believe its purely a political decision.

“I suspect the [US government's] reasons are complex and not just political expedience,” Méndez said during the book salon. “But complexity is no excuse in this case, especially because the US could use its influence positively and, in general, I don’t think it does. Israel is by no means the worst offender in the region, nor are some forces innocent of abuse on the Palestinian side either. But the human rights issues are real and Israel’s ability to fend them off with support of the US and other Western governments is not only a problem for the victims of abuse; it is also an obstacle to peace.

Overall, Méndez said Obama’s “failure of leadership” and his decision to “look forward, not backwards,” on human rights abuses that took place during the Bush years is “seen [by foreign government leaders] as a decline in [US] influence and moral authority … that hurts other foreign policy interests as well.”

Speaking of “looking forward,” this is perhaps the best example of Obama’s “twisted version of American exceptionalism”: in March of 2010, Obama spoke to an Indonesian television reporter who queried him about whether he was satisfied the Indonesian government was taking proper steps to address past human rights abuses.

Obama said, “We have to acknowledge that those past human rights abuses existed. We can’t go forward without looking backwards.” (Emphasis added.)

Méndez and Wentworth understand that Obama will never exercise his responsibility as dictated in the Convention Against Torture, and initiate an investigation into past human rights abuses that took place during the eight years George Bush occupied the White House.

“Juan and I feel strongly that you pay for it in the end,” Wentworth said in an interview following the book salon. “I think we’re going to pay a price in ways we don’t even know.”

Méndez agreed, but he still remains hopeful.

“None of us can really hold our breath while we wait for the [US government] to live up to its obligation to investigate, prosecute and punish every act of torture committed by its agents,” Méndez said during the book salon. “The lack of delivery on the promise to have a day of reckoning [which Attorney General Eric Holder had said the public was owed] is truly disappointing. But again, experience shows that issues of accountability do not go away. Of course, it is preferable to have accountability in real time. But justice, even if it comes late, will come and be welcome.”

That brings to mind the maxim, “the wheels of justice grind slowly but exceedingly fine,” which would apply to recent court action in Argentina where a dozen former military and police officials, including a Navy officer who earned the nickname “Angel of Death,” were sentenced to life in prison last month for the kidnapping, murder and torture of leftist activists during the height of the country’s military dictatorship in the 1970s. Méndez was one of the activists tortured. There’s a riveting section in “Taking A Stand” where he describes in detail how his torturers used an electric prod on his genitals and other parts of his body until he begged them to kill him. That he survived and went on to shape the modern human rights movement is nothing short of a miracle.

Méndez’s criticisms of the US government’s human rights record is not limited to its treatment of war-on-terror detainees. He also butted heads with the Obama administration over the military’s treatment of Pfc. Bradley Manning, an Army intelligence analyst who is accused of leaking government secrets to WikiLeaks and faces life in prison. A pretrial hearing for Manning is scheduled for Friday at Fort Meade, Maryland.

Méndez said he became concerned about Manning when he started to hear reports about his abusive treatment, which included being held in solitary confinement for 23-hours a day, during his incarceration at Quantico. Méndez said he had “frank conversation[s] with the [Department of Defense] about the conditions of [Manning's] incarceration” and requested that he be permitted to visit and speak with the soldier confidentially.

“I was allowed to see him but with no guarantees of confidentiality, terms that I could not accept,” Méndez said during the Firedoglake book salon. “I offered to see Manning nonetheless, through his lawyer, if he wanted to see me, but he preferred not to waive his right to a truly private conversation. In the meantime, when he was moved from Quantico to Fort Leavenworth, his conditions changed and since last April he is no longer in solitary confinement. I am still insisting on seeing him. In a few weeks I will release my views on the case, since the exchange of information with the [US government] is essentially over.”

Still image taken from the Amnesty International film Stuff Of Life, a film about waterboarding, the practice of torturing prisoners by partially drowning them

It could have been big news, if U.S. torture weren’t so anathema to the press corps, such that reporting upon it is considered either a fruitless and unprofitable enterprise, or among most of those who do venture into such waters, the sine qua non for such reportage must be ignorance and/or cover-up for much of what the U.S. military and intelligence agencies do.

Consider that during the recent Senate debate over the Defense Authorization Bill — the one that passed provisions on indefinite detention that drew cries of outrage from a number of law professors, and stoked fear among government opponents — Senator Dianne Feinstein, while speaking against provisions of the bill that would subject U.S. citizens to indefinite detention also made some serious points concerning the torture-interrogation amendment offered by Sen. Kelly Ayotte (R-New Hampshire). (See PDF link of her remarks – h/t Marcy Wheeler.)

Feinstein announced that the much-heralded, and much forgotten review of CIA torture undertaken by the Senate Intelligence Committee, first reported by Jason Leopold back in April 2010, is wrapping up its investigation. But her comments went unregarded and unreported, as patience for such things as fighting torture is not the strong suit of American political discourse, nor is much expected anymore from a Congress that has so clearly lost its bearings.

But, nevertheless, the announcement is not without interest, as Feinstein told her colleagues:

As chairman of the Select Committee on Intelligence, I can say that we are nearing the completion [of] a comprehensive review of the CIA’s former interrogation and detention program, and I can assure the Senate and the Nation that coercive and abusive treatment of detainees in U.S. custody was far more systematic and widespread than we thought.

Moreover, the abuse stemmed not from the isolated acts of a few bad apples but from fact that the line was blurred between what is permissible and impermissible conduct, putting U.S. personnel in an untenable position with their superiors and the law.

That is why Congress and the executive branch subsequently acted to provide our intelligence and military professionals with the clarity and guidance they need to effectively carry out their missions. And that is where the Army Field Manual comes in.

It is not surprising to hear the torture was worse than already known. After all, the purpose of secrecy and the cult of classification, so assiduously courted by the current Administration, is to hide crimes. So one can only hope the Intelligence Committee will, when the review is truly and finally complete (and let’s hope it’s not another 18 months), that its findings will be released publicly. In fact, in a decent world, it would be demanded.

Lies that facilitate torture – Case-in-point: the Army Field Manual

One reason for the lulled non-murmur over torture is the outrageous lie that Obama, after coming into office, “ended torture.” He enshrined the Army Field Manual as the supposedly humane alternative to the Bush torture regime of “enhanced interrogation techniques.” Feinstein, who certainly knows better, is an exemplary model for such myth-making — “myth” because the Army Field Manual actually uses torture of various sorts, and even though about half-a-dozen human rights and legal organizations, and a number of prominent government interrogators have said so (see this Nov. 2010 letter signed by 14 well-known interrogators to then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates) — as her following comments on the Army Field Manual (AFM) demonstrate.

Here, Sen. Feinstein is polemicizing against the Ayotte amendment, which was ignominiously dismissed via a parliamentary maneuver, along with a few dozen other amendments, after an ostentatious Senate “colloquy” on the matter by Senators Ayotte and Lieberman (with Lindsay Graham chiming in at the very end). The amendment awaits its resurrection, seeking passage attached like an obligate parasite to another bill some months down the line. (The authorization bill is currently “in conference,” as a final version is worked out that reconciles both House and Senate versions. It is not unknown for provisions to be slipped in under such circumstances, and I wouldn’t count out yet Ayotte/Lieberman/Graham’s attempt to insert a new secret annex to the AFM, not until, like the undead, a stake is driven through its heart.)

Feinstein:

However, Senator Ayotte’s amendment would require the executive branch to adopt a classified interrogation annex to the Army Field Manual, a concept that even the Bush administration rejected outright in 2006.

Senator Ayotte argued that the United States needs secret and undisclosed interrogation measures to successfully interrogate terrorists and gain actionable intelligence. However, our intelligence, military, and law enforcement professionals, who actually interrogate terrorists as part of their jobs, universally disagree. They believe that with the Army Field Manual as it currently is written, they have the tools needed to obtain actionable intelligence from U.S. detainees.

As an example, in 2009, after an extensive review, the intelligence community unanimously asserted that it had all the guidance and tools it needed to conduct effective interrogations. The Special Task Force on Interrogations–which included representatives from the CIA, Defense Department, the Office of the Director of Intelligence, and others–concluded that “no additional or different guidance was necessary.”

Since 2009, the interagency High Value Detainee Interrogation Group has briefed the Select Committee on Intelligence numerous times. The group has repeatedly assured the committee that they have all authority they need to effectively gain actionable intelligence. As a consummate consumer of the intelligence products they produce, I agree.

Unfortunately, Sen. Feinstein is oddly correct. Between standard interrogation methods and CIA-derived interrogation techniques meant to break down a prisoner psychologically, they do really have all they “need.”

Feinstein never mentions the years-long protests about certain provisions of the AFM, many of them gathered in the document’s Appendix M, that have been found tantamount to torture — the use of drugs (so long as they don’t “induce lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage,” the harsh manipulation of fears and phobias, the elimination of wording from the previous version of the AFM that would ban stress positions, the use of isolation, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation techniques. All of these are mingled in with a number of other basic interrogation techniques, but that doesn’t diminish the cruel irony of Feinstein’s IC-based assurance that that government interrogators “had all the guidance and tools it needed to conduct effective interrogations.” Guidance and tools, indeed.

Perhaps she could have quoted the letter to Gates, signed by Ali Soufan, Steven Kleinman, Jack Cloonan, Robert Baer, Mark Fallon, Malcolm Nance and others, which noted “the use of potentially abusive questioning tactics” in the Army Field Manual. Of course, these government interrogators softened their language (“potentially”?) and couched their opposition in terms of what hurts the national interest, versus what is wrong or illegal.

But when it comes to protecting the massive military-intelligence complex, such awkward facts as the use of cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment of prisoners, as well as outright torture enshrined in the Army Field Manual are not worthy of note. Even the many human rights groups who opposed the Ayotte amendment all buried any past critique of the AFM or its Appendix M in their polemics against Ayotte’s “classified annex” proposal. This is not the way to win a battle!

Honoring “our values”?

Feinstein concluded:

We cannot have it both ways. Either we make clear to the world that the United States will honor our values and treat prisoners humanely or we let the world believe that we have secret interrogation methods to terrorize and torture our prisoners.

But what about interrogation methods that are not secret, Sen. Feinstein?

I don’t seriously expect her to respond. Instead I ask readers, what kind of a country is it that has torture written into its public documents, and no one raises a fuss (or practically no one)?

The failure to take on the AFM and its Appendix M abuses in a serious fashion has led in a straight line to the political pornography of watching torture debated in Congress and among Presidential candidates, as well as a surge of political effort being made in some circles to make sure all such abuse is hidden forever behind a veil of classification. This failure is directly the responsibility of the human rights groups, who have not made it clear to their constituencies and the public at large how serious the problem currently is. While most of them are on the record of opposing the abuses described above, they repeatedly have pulled their punches for political reasons (as during the recent debate on the Ayotte amendment), and as a result, they must take the hard criticism when it comes, until, or unless they turn this around.

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

Guantanamo detainee Fayiz al-Kandari

This story was written by Jason Leopold and originally published on Truthout.

A video released by the Pentagon showing several Guantanamo detainees praying, exercising and playing soccer has angered Kuwaitis, who believe one of the prisoners is a citizen of the country and is being used by the US government as a “propaganda” tool in an attempt to demonstrate the humane conditions of nearly a decade of indefinite detention, according to attorneys representing the man.

The one-minute-and-19-second video, according to a Defense Department spokesman, is “B-roll footage” that was shot on November 4 by Joint Task Force-Guantanamo personnel and provided to the media covering the arraignment at the prison of high-value detainee Abd Al-Rahim Al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the October 2000 bombing of the USS Cole.

The video, which does not show the detainees’ faces, was shot in Camp 6, which houses “cooperative” detainees. The detainees, some of whom are wearing sneakers, shorts and beige and white prison garb, are also seen taking what appears to be a leisurly stroll on the prison grounds.

Air Force Lt. Col. Barry Wingard, a military lawyer who is defending Kuwaiti Fayiz al-Kandari against war crimes charges before the military commission at Guantanamo, told Truthout that it took “all but a couple of seconds to identify my client in the video” through other identifying features that the Pentagon did not obscure. Wingard said al-Kandari is the detainee kicking a soccer ball.

Wingard suggested the Pentagon released the video in an attempt to sabotage his work on al-Kandari’s case. He said the video was posted on the Internet a few days before he arrived in Kuwait to meet with government officials to discuss ways to “facilitate [al-Kandari's] release back to Kuwait’s state of the art rehabilitation center built at the request of the Bush administration, which is currently vacant.” [A previously classified State Department cable, released in September by WikiLeaks, says planning for the rehabilitation center began in September 2008, following a discussion between Prime Minister Nasser Al-Sabah and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice in Washington "on the possible role of such a center with respect to Kuwait's four [at the time] remaining Guantanamo detainees.”]

“I first saw the video of my client, Fayiz al-Kandari, when I touched down in Kuwait for a scheduled visit,” Wingard said. “My first thought was that there is no way the United States government sank so low as to show my client to the world, caged like a circus animal. Still, there he was, standing in a chain link, kennel-like enclosure, where he has essentially spent the last ten years without every having been charged with a crime.”

Wingard said word quickly spread in Kuwait that one of the detainees in the video was al-Kandari. He said the message that the US government was trying to disseminate – that al-Kandari and the other detainees featured in the video were in “good health” – has backfired.

“As I traveled around Kuwait, I discovered that people were not seeing the positive image the spin doctors had engineered,” Wingard said. “Instead, they saw a man in a dog cage, cut off from his country, and subjected to injustice for a decade without trial. Thus truth has shone through – and it has had an amazing impact on the steadily declining support the United States had taken for granted here in Kuwait. I can tell you without a doubt, this video puts the inhumanity of Guantanamo into motion unlike any still picture I could have shown.”

A State Department spokesperson did not return calls for comment.

The issue of al-Kandari’s indefinite detention and the other Kuwaiti detainee imprisoned at Guantanamo, Fawzi Al-Ouda, was reportedly one of the talking points during a meeting that took place at the White House in September between Vice President Joe Biden and Prime Minister of Kuwait Sheikh Nasser Mohammad Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah.

A statement released to the media in September by Kuwaiti Ambassador to Washington Sheikh Salem Abdullah Al-Jaber said the prime minister called on Biden to take immediate steps to secure al-Kandari and Al-Ouda’s release. The prime minister also discussed the case with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and told her it is a priority issue for the Kuwaiti government, according to the ambassador’s statement.

Adel Abdulhadi, al-Kandari’s Kuwaiti-based attorney, told Truthout that the video “has angered every single person I’ve spoken with.”

“Whoever thought it might be a good idea to show our son in a dog kennel should be fired,” he said. “When I saw the video I thought, we must do something after ten years without a trial. As a result I’m organizing a protest outside the US Embassy” on Sunday.

Lt. Col. Todd Breasseale told Truthout the government’s only agenda in releasing the video is to show the world that “Defense Department personnel working in detention facilities operate under a high level of scrutiny and consistently provide the most humane and safe care and custody of individuals under their control.

“It’s important to us and to the global community that we continue to be as transparent as possible in all that we do – while still maintaining very necessary operational security – to show current conditions” at Guantanamo, Breasseale said.

But Daphne Eviatar, a senior associate at Human Rights First’s Law and Security Program, also likened the video released by the Pentagon to propaganda and said it is not a realistic portrayal of the detainees’ lives.

“For years, Human Rights First and other human rights observers have refused to take the [Department of Defense] prison press tours for exactly this reason – because it allows the US government to portray the prison as a great place to live where detainees get lots of exercise, take art classes and work on their resumes,” Eviatar said. “Such tours, and the B-roll video, are designed to distract observers from the fact that these men are being imprisoned indefinitely, most without charge or trial, in a faraway prison where they’re completely cut off from their homes, families and communities. Neither the video nor the prison tours reveal the suffering that they or their families endure.”

Eviatar added that the Defense Department has refused to allow human rights observers and journalists to speak to detainees imprisoned at Guantanamo, many of whom have already been cleared for release or transfer, or Bagram, “the other official and much larger detention center” in Afghanistan and “ask them what their lives are really like there.”

“That in itself negates the positive spin they’re trying to put on an inherently deplorable situation,” she added. “The military shouldn’t be surprised to hear that its video is outraging people in other countries who have lost family, friends and community members due to the US indefinite detention scheme.”

Breasseale said the last time B-roll footage was “updated” was more than one year ago, and he noted the Defense Department works closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross, “which has access to all detainees interned by the Department of Defense.”

Wingard, however, does not believe al-Kandari’s presence in the video is coincidental. He said al-Kandari was transferred to Camp 6 a week or so before the Pentagon said the video was shot. Al-Kandari had spent the past five months in solitary confinement for taking part in a hunger strike to protest the seizure of his “personal belongings,” which included” his “attorney/client information folders,” Wingard said.

“I believe he ended up in the video so the US government could show the Kuwaitis that he was in good health after spending months in isolation,” Wingard said.

Al-Kandari, who speaks English, was previously housed in Camp 1 along with ten other detainees who speak English, are well-educated and whom the DoD had segregated because the agency believed they were “troublemakers” and an “influence” on other Guantanamo prisoners, according to several Guantanamo guards.

Guantanamo officials began the process of permanently shuttering camps 4 and 1 in January and moved all of the detainees interned there to camps 5 and 6 in preparation for an executive order signed by President Obama in March establishing a policy of indefinite detention for dozens of Guantanamo detainees.

Wingard, who holds a top-secret security clearance, said since al-Kandari was moved to Camp 6 he was told by Guantanamo officials that prison personnel “will now be doing a ‘cursory’ review of all written  correspondence between [al-Kandari] and me, which even under the Bush administration was treated as off limits.”

Wingard said, in the past, when he sent mail to al-Kandari at Guantanamo it was received by a Defense Department liaison who “printed it off and put it in sealed envelope which was then given to the government.”

“The government would then unseal the envelope in the presence of Fayiz and hand him the confidential mail,” Wingard said. “Now, instead of opening the mail in front of him, they do a ‘cursory’ review before delivering the mail to him and decide what he should and shouldn’t get. Additionally, they have taken all all our past correspondence to conduct a ‘review’ of each item. I have instructed Fayiz, and my other client, [Afghan] Abdul Ghani, to destroy all our legal correspondence going forward to prevent the government from taking it in the future.”

Breasseale was unavailable to respond to follow-up questions about Wingard’s claims.

In the lead up to al-Nashiri’s military commission trial, the new commander of the Guantanamo, Navy Rear Adm. David B. Woods, authorized the seizure and review of high-value detainees’ legal mail and other materials from the top-secret camp where they reside. The military judge presiding over Nashiri’s tribunal has since ordered an end to the practice.

Al-Kandari, a humanitarian aid worker, who said he was in Afghanistan in 2001 to help repair a mosque and build two wells, was captured by the Northern Alliance in December 2001 and sold to US forces for a bounty. US government officials claimed in a November 2008 military commission charge sheet that al-Kandari was was an adviser to Osama bin Laden, training al-Qaeda recruits and “produced recruitment audio and video tapes which encouraged membership in al-Qaeda and participation in jihad.”

US District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly denied al-Kandari’s petition for habeas corpus last year, citing inconsistencies in his statements about his reasons for being in Afghainstan even though she said the reliability of the government’s evidence against him was questionable.

The government’s entire case against al-Kandari, who Wingard said was subjected to “hundreds of ‘enhanced interrogation’ sessions, which included “physical assaults,” sleep deprivation, stress positions, loud music and temperature extremes, is based almost entirely on hearsay evidence obtained from other detainees.

Al-Kandari appealed Kollar-Kotelly’s decision. Oral arguments in the case was scheduled to be heard Friday in the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, but was canceled by the court.

UPDATE: Wingard claims this is another video clip of al-Kandari, seen standing in a cage hanging laundry, that the Pentagon released within the past two weeks. The one-minute, thirty-one second video was posted on YouTube November 7, and has has been viewed more than 18,000 times. According to Wingard, this video has also caused an uproar among Kuwaitis who believe the detainee is al-Kandari. Neither Breasseale nor another Defense Department spokesperson was available Saturday to confirm whether the clip was produced by Joint Task Force-Guantanamo and if it was part of the same B-roll footage provided to the media during Nashiri’s arraignment.