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Keystone cops: CIA should explain destroyed tapes

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

The CIA and the public should already know who ordered interrogation tapes destroyed, and why

Since the news broke that the CIA had destroyed hundreds of hours of videotapes of the interrogation of two suspected terrorists, at least four investigations have begun or been threatened. However, few of the investigators seem in a hurry to learn the truth.

Within 24 hours of being asked to testify before Congress, CIA Director Mike Hayden should have been able to learn who destroyed the tapes, who ordered them destroyed and for what reason. After all, he’s the director of a vast and elaborate intelligence gathering agency. If the CIA can’t know what its personnel in Washington are doing, how can it expect to learn the world’s secrets?

Hayden’s reluctance to be candid with the people’s representatives suggests that the truth is scandalous or embarrassing to the agency. He told members of the House Intelligence Committee that the tapes, documenting hundreds of hours of harsh interrogation methods, had been made to protect the interrogators from being prosecuted for torture. But if the tapes had to be destroyed, the protection vanished. What was the point?

Hayden said the tapes were destroyed to protect the interrogators’ identities. If that were true, the tapes would not have been made in the first place. The interrogators’ identities would never have been exposed to risk.

A more likely reason for the tapes’ destruction is that they show interrogation methods that on a TV screen look remarkably like torture. If the interrogations were in fact torture, illegal in this country, the destruction of the tapes would constitute tampering with evidence of a crime.

The Justice Department and CIA are conducting, at a glacial pace, a joint investigation. Last week Assistant Attorney General Kenneth Wainstein and CIA Inspector General John Helgerson asked members of the House and Senate Intelligence committees not to interfere with the investigation by conducting parallel probes. Wainstein and Helgerson could not predict how long Congress must wait for answers.

In a world in which the administration yearned for the truth, government investigators would already have interviewed the interrogators who were taped and the officials who ordered the tapes destroyed. Any CIA official who didn’t cooperate would be subject to dismissal.

The government’s official investigation seems designed to make the case seem complicated and prolonged. It shouldn’t have to be. No wonder a federal judge is threatening in frustration to mount his own investigation.

The tapes, which recorded the use of waterboarding, or simulated drowning, were not destroyed to protect agents’ identities. They were almost certainly destroyed because they recorded behavior most Americans find abhorrent.

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‘Innocent man Tasered eight times’

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Police are investigating a complaint that a man who later proved to be unarmed and innocent was repeatedly shocked with a Taser gun.

Daniel Sylvester, the 45-year-old owner of an east London security firm, was driving home on October 20 when he was stopped by armed police.

Mr Sylvester told The Guardian he got out of his car and was surrounded by officers, at least two of whom carried automatic weapons.

Without warning one officer fired a 50,000 volt Taser into the back of his head, he claimed.

He was shocked again, causing him to fall on his face and break a front tooth, and a further six shocks made him wet himself and left him lying in the road while his car was searched by officers and sniffer dogs, eventually finding nothing.

The incident was part of Operation Neon, which aims to crack down on guns in London’s streets by using number plate recognition and armed reponse teams to stop and search vehicles.

The Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) confirmed they are supervising an investigation that is being carried out by the Met Standards Directorate.

A spokesman for the Metropolitan Police said: “Just after midnight on the 20th, officers on an intelligence-led operation stopped a car in Bounces Road, N9. The driver got out of the vehicle and was subsequently Tasered. Our information is the Taser was deployed once.

“A complaint has been made to police regarding the incident and the DPS (Director of Professional Standards) are investigating.”

The Association of Chief Police Officers (Acpo) say in their guidelines Tasers should be deployed where officers “may have to protect the public, themselves and/or the subject(s) at incidents of violence or threats of violence of such severity that they will need to use force.”

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Government’s ‘Cavalier attitude to personal data’

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Commenting on yesterday’s statement by the Department for Transport Ruth Kelly on the loss of details of three million driving test candidates, Liberal Democrat Shadow Transport Secretary, Susan Kramer MP said:

“This is yet another appalling example of the Government’s cavalier attitude to personal data. If my bank behaved like this I would change it - if only the general public were so fortunate.

“How can a Government with such a dismal record on this issue have the nerve to demand that we trust it to look after sensitive personal information on an ID card database?

“The Government knew about this in May. If it hadn’t been for the child benefits fiasco, how much longer would they have sat on the news? Is there anything else that they’re keeping from us?

“Perhaps it would save time if any departments that have not had major security breaches could let us know now.”

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Millions more ID records go missing

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Philip Webster

The records of more than three million British learner drivers have gone missing from a “secure facility” in the US, an embarrassed Government admitted last night.

Labour’s dismal autumn hit another low as, minutes after ministers admitted that they still did not know the whereabouts of two discs holding sensitive information on 25 million people, they were forced to confess they had lost the details of all candidates for the driving theory test between 2004 and 2007.

Opposition politicians raised questions last night over whether the Government could safely go ahead with plans to place the records of 50 million health service patients on an electronic database, its “spy-in-the-sky” scheme to monitor every journey by 33 million vehicles, and national ID cards.

The latest security breach came as The Times has learnt that ministers are toughening sanctions against the wilful abuse of data — making it an offence punishable by a two-year prison sentence rather than a fine.

The driving test records from September 2004 to April 2007 have gone missing from a facility in Iowa City, Iowa.

Names, addresses and phone numbers — but not financial data — were among the details on a computer hard disc that was found to have disappeared in May.

They were at the site of Pearson Driving Assessments, a private contractor to the Driving Standards Agency that designs the software for the theory test, administers the test, books people in for it, and then keeps their records. The company performed this task from Minnesota, then sent the disc containing all the records by secure courier to its facility in Iowa.

It was booked as having arrived but when staff looked for it in May they could not find it and alerted the agency.

Government officials insisted last night that the breach was of a minor order compared with recent ones and said that most of the information would be available in the telephone book.

Ruth Kelly, the Transport Secretary, who told the Commons about the breach on its penultimate day before the recess, was told only on November 28 after a data audit she had requested in her department.

The Times has been told that the agency informed Stephen Ladyman, a former junior transport minister, last June and Pearson was asked to carry out a full review of its security arrangements. Ms Kelly reported it to the Information Commissioner and he had judged the risks presented by the loss were not “substantial” as the details did not include bank account details, national insurance numbers, driving licence numbers, dates of birth, a copy of the signature or the result of the test.

The Transport Secretary also said that the disc was “formatted specifically to fit Pearson configuration” and was not easily read by third parties.

Because banking details were not included in the lost data, individuals are not being informed, she said.

But Ms Kelly apologised for anyone for any “uncertainty or concern” caused. An advice line has been set up by the agency.

Theresa Villiers, the Shadow Transport Secretary, said that the Government was failing in its duty to obey its own laws on data security and called it further evidence of a “systemic failure” in handling private data.

Ms Kelly’s surprise statement came after Alistair Darling, the Chancellor, told MPs that there was little progress in the inquiry into the loss of the two child benefit discs, despite widespread police searches and the offer of a £20,000 reward for their return.

Mr Darling said that the police had no intelligence of data falling into “the wrong hands” and banks had “no evidence of any activities suggesting evidence of fraud”.

Mr Darling said that Kieran Poynter, the PricewaterhouseCoopers chairman appointed to lead the investigation into the incident, “says his work is far from complete and his conclusions will develop as his work progresses”.

Philip Hammond, for the Conservatives, said that it had been “the most catastrophic data security breach in British history” and criticised Mr Darling’s early explanation that a junior official who had not followed the rules was responsible.

“Responsibility for systemic failure does not lie with junior staff — it lies at the very top,” he said.

“In the face of the overwhelming scale of systemic failure, this statement can only be described as a wholly inadequate response from a wholly inadequate chancellor.” Meanwhile, an efficiency review of Revenue & Customs found that “the senior leadership has not been successful in injecting pace, confidence and dynamism throughout the department”.

The top team “has more to do to demonstrate that it can take the tough decisions required to set priorities and to bring about organisational clarity”. It also needed “a robust plan” to resolve staff “uncertainty” and be clear about what Revenue & Customs would look like in the future.

On another inauspicious day for No 10 and No 11, a similar review of the Treasury found that the department commanded by Mr Darling and for ten years by Mr Brown could improve its “outcomes” if it acted with “greater humility” and in a more open and inclusive way.

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Sealed Off by Israel, Gaza Reduced to Beggary

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Scott Wilson

GAZA CITY — The batteries are the size of a button on a man’s shirt, small silvery dots that power hearing aids for several hundred Palestinian students taught by the Atfaluna Society for Deaf Children in Gaza City.

Now the batteries, marketed by Radio Shack, are all but used up. The few that are left are losing power, turning voices into unintelligible echoes in the ears of Hala Abu Saif’s 20 first-grade students.

The Israeli government is increasingly restricting the import into the Gaza Strip of batteries, anesthesia drugs, antibiotics, tobacco, coffee, gasoline, diesel fuel and other basic items, including chocolate and compressed air to make soft drinks.

This punishing seal has reduced Gaza, a territory of almost 1.5 million people, to beggar status, unable to maintain an effective public health system, administer public schools or preserve the traditional pleasures of everyday life by the sea.

“Essentially, it’s the ordinary people, caught up in the conflict, paying the price for this political failure,” said John Ging, director of the U.N. Relief and Works Agency in Gaza, which serves the majority refugee population. “The humanitarian situation is atrocious, and it is easy to understand why — 1.2 million Gazans now relying on U.N. food aid, 80,000 people who have lost jobs and the dignity of work. And the list goes on.”

Israeli military and political leaders say the restrictions are prompted by near-constant rocket and small-arms attacks and concerns over what uses Palestinian gunmen might have for some materials entering Gaza, particularly fuel and batteries.

The Israeli cordon tightened in June, when Hamas, a radical Islamic movement at war with Israel, seized control of Gaza. Israeli officials have insisted to the Bush administration that no humanitarian crisis would result from the sanctions imposed on the territory.

But for Gazans, caught between Israel’s concrete gun towers and the Mediterranean, the sense of crisis is pervasive as they struggle to keep their homes intact, buy essential food from a shrinking and increasingly expensive stock, and educate their children.

“I hold every man, woman and child in Israel responsible for this,” said Geraldine Shawa, 64, the Chicago-born director of the Atfaluna Society. A tall, imposing woman who has lived in Gaza for 36 years, Shawa has watched the fortunes of her pupils squeezed in recent months by what she calls Israel’s practice of collective punishment.

Israeli military officials said last week that 2,000 rockets had been launched from Gaza toward Israel this year, killing two Israelis, wounding many others and instilling fear across the southern region. Since the U.S.-sponsored peace conference in Annapolis, Md., last month, Israeli airstrikes and ground forces have killed 26 Hamas gunmen, the Islamic organization says, as well as at least four Palestinian civilians.

Hamas’s military wing is not behind most of the rocket attacks, for which smaller armed groups generally assert responsibility. But Hamas leaders do little to stop the firing of the rockets and rarely, if ever, condemn them.

On Tuesday, Israeli tanks rolled into the central Gaza city of Khan Younis. Six armed Palestinians from the Popular Resistance Committees, a militant splinter group, and the radical Islamic Jihad organization were killed in fighting. Israeli officials labeled the operation “routine.”

“I hold each of them responsible, just as they obviously seem to hold all of us responsible,” Shawa said of the Israelis. “If the Israeli government really has the power and the desire to change, well, this is pushing me in exactly the opposite way — over the edge.”
An Isolated Collective

Moamen Ayash, a frail, 6-year-old Palestinian boy in navy blue slacks and a pressed dress shirt, walked to the whiteboard at the front of his tidy classroom to work through some simple sign phrases.

Moamen has not had a working hearing aid for three months. Israeli military officials said they had no idea the batteries were not being delivered.

The inability to hear even the faintest sounds, which hearing aids sometimes make possible for the deaf, hinders children such as Moamen from acquiring spoken language.

Because few of the estimated 20,000 Gazans suffering from hearing loss know even rudimentary sign language, the deaf here represent an isolated collective, dependent for funding largely on the kindness of strangers and the proceeds of their own crafts shop.

Their condition resembles in some ways the larger estrangement of Gaza, a fenced-in, chaotic jumble of squalid refugee camps set amid rubble-strewn dunes that might someday be perches for resort hotels overlooking the turquoise sea.

Work is rare. Food is scarce. Gasoline is so hard to come by that Mahmoud al-Khozendar, 49, has hung an effigy of a man in a suit above the empty gas pumps at his station. The sign pinned to the hanging man’s chest reads: “The Man in Charge.”

Israel delivers electricity to Gaza that provides roughly 60 percent of the territory’s energy. An Israeli Supreme Court decision is expected any day on whether the supply can be reduced as punishment for the rocket fire from Gaza, which Israel evacuated in the fall of 2005 after nearly four decades of military occupation.

In the rank, crowded wards of Gaza City’s Shifa Hospital, the dispensary is out of 85 essential medicines and close to using up almost 150 others.

Dialysis treatment has been cut back from three to two times a week for even the most critically ill kidney patients, roughly 900 in all. A stack of nearly two dozen blood-cleaning machines gathers dust in a corner, awaiting spare parts that Palestinian doctors say have not been allowed through the border crossings between Gaza and Israel.

The minister of health, Bassem Naim, said in an interview last week that he is husbanding a two-week stock of anesthetic at a time when Israel is threatening to mount a broad military offensive into Gaza to end the rocket fire.

“They have turned Gaza into an animal farm — we only are allowed to get what keeps us alive,” he said.

Since June, Naim said, more than three dozen Palestinians seeking treatment for cancer and other critical illnesses at Israel’s more advanced hospitals were rejected for passage by Israeli security agencies. The Israeli nonprofit group Physicians for Human Rights estimates the number of rejections “in the tens.”

According to Naim, at least 29 patients have died since June, including 12-year-old Tamer al-Yazji, who Palestinian health officials said was denied entry into Israel after developing acute complications from encephalitis. Of the patients who approached Physicians for Human Rights for help, seven died before being granted passage to Israel, according to the organization.

“What do you call sending dozens of Gaza patients to a slow death because they are refused treatment?” Naim said. “That’s not a humanitarian crisis. That’s a war crime.”

Maj. Peter Lerner, Israel’s military liaison for international organizations working in Gaza, said 8,000 Gazans have been permitted to enter Israel for medical care since June.

It is not a risk-free venture for Israel. In 2004, a Palestinian woman detonated an explosives vest near the main Erez Crossing, killing four Israelis and herself. A year and a half later, a 21-year-old Palestinian woman passing through Erez for medical care at Soroka hospital in southern Israel was discovered smuggling a 20-pound bomb, which she unsuccessfully attempted to detonate.

“Hamas should be held accountable to the Palestinian people in Gaza,” Lerner said. “They can’t fire rockets in the morning and expect the crossings to be open for the sick in the afternoon.”
Blackouts and Shortages

When Israel withdrew 8,500 Jewish settlers from Gaza along with the soldiers protecting them, Israeli leaders said the strip could become a prosperous proving ground for a future Palestinian state.

But since the rocket attacks from Gaza began — killing a total of 13 Israeli citizens since the start of the most recent Palestinian uprising in September 2000 — the frequent closure of crossings to Israel has choked the export-reliant Palestinian economy.

Hamas, which won parliamentary elections in January 2006, trounced the U.S.-backed Fatah movement in Gaza in June. The violent takeover, which Hamas swiftly consolidated politically and culturally, cemented the strip’s isolation.

The political divide is widening between the West Bank, where the U.S.-backed administration of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas of Fatah is in control, and Hamas-run Gaza. The two regions were once envisioned as the twin territories of a Palestinian state.

Now rolling blackouts have begun across the strip, partly because the Palestinian Authority refused for days last week to pay the Israeli company that supplies fuel to Gaza. The strip was receiving only about 24,000 gallons of diesel fuel a day, the lifeblood of the private-sector economy. Before June, the strip received nearly 80,000 gallons of diesel a day.

The Authority has paid its bills, but Israel has limited daily diesel deliveries to Gaza to about 50,000 gallons, some of which is used by the Hamas government and security forces. In addition, Israel sends 80,000 gallons a month directly to the U.N. agency for refugees to ensure that its operation continues.

Lerner, the Israeli military liaison, said this week that he would contact the International Committee of the Red Cross to make sure hearing-aid batteries would be allowed through the crossings.

A spokeswoman for the Atfaluna Society said none had been received so far.

The restrictions have also hampered the society’s vocational programs, which use well-equipped wood shops, weaving looms and pottery studios. Thread for traditional Palestinian embroidery, wood for painted boxes and pottery glazes mostly remain on the far side of the backlogged Israeli border crossings.

“We may have enough for another month,” said Mohamed al-Sharif, 36, who supervises the classes. “Then we will run out again.”

Trucks carrying tobacco and coffee usually have low priority in the lines backed up at the crossings. Israeli military officials say they try to push 60 to 70 trucks through a day, despite frequent rocket and small-arms attacks.

In the meantime, Gazans improvise. “We’ve bought 20 tons of coffee from every store here we could find,” said Riyadh Haigar, owner of the popular Delice Coffee Shop. “Maybe it’ll last a month. Then we close the doors.”

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