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Beijing To Use 10,000 Internet Spies

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

RINF NEWS

Beijing authorities are set to ramp up monitoring of Internet usage as the city plans to hire at least 10,000 censors to keep an eye out for “harmful” websites and content.

The Chinese Government are also attempting to ensure that every new PC sold contains web filtering software that can block political websites and blogs. From 1st July 2009 all  computer manufacturiers will have to include a programme called Green Dam/Youth Escort, that was developed under commission by the government.

A Californian software company, Solid Oak, claims the software infringes its intellectual property rights.

Solid Oak chief executive, Brian Milburn, said: “If our code is being used to censor a country, we stand up to things like that,” he said. His company was considering whether such action was feasible.

“If we can’t stop HP and Dell from shipping, I guess the only way to resolve this would be an interim licensing agreement,” he said.

Chinese groups opposed to Beijing’s move had offered assistance in taking legal action in the country.

The Chinese media are refusing to give the issue the coverage it deserves, instead following instructions by officials to concentrate on “positive reporting”.

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Obama Given $100 Billion For Illegal Wars

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

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Al Qaeda leader arrested over Sunni MP’s killing

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

Iraqi police arrested a top Al-Qaeda operative on Wednesday over the killing of a senior Sunni Muslim MP and human rights advocate who was shot dead in a Baghdad mosque last week.

 

The arrest came after intelligence efforts led police to a house in the western Baghdad neighbourhood of Ghazaliyah, not far from Al-Yarmuk where Harith al-Obaidi was assassinated on Friday.

“We received information from one of our sources in Ghazaliyah that the group involved in the assassination were in one house,” Brigadier General Noaman Dakhil Jawad, the commander of the police’s rapid intervention forces in Baghdad, told AFP.

“We prepared our forces, we raided the house, and we arrested the criminal Ahmed Abed Oweiyed.”

Jawad said Oweiyed was the deputy commander of Al-Qaeda’s military wing in Iraq.

“Through intelligence efforts, we tracked down the criminal who masterminded the killing,” he said.

A teenage gunman shot dead Obaidi and his bodyguard in Al-Shawaf mosque in the predominantly Sunni neighbourhood of Al-Yarmuk after Obaidi led worship on the weekly Muslim day of prayer.

The gunman then killed three others and wounded 12 by throwing a grenade into a crowd, before killing himself.

Obaidi, born in 1966, was deputy chairman of parliament’s human rights committee and head of the biggest Sunni bloc in parliament, the National Concord Front.

The day before he was killed, he called for an independent inquiry into torture and abuse of detainees in Iraq’s prisons.

Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki led mourners at Obaidi’s funeral on Saturday, while Vice President Adel Abdel Mahdi, a Shiite Muslim like Maliki, described the murder as a “brutal crime.”

Iraq has seen several political assassinations since the US-led invasion of March 2003.

In February, Islamic Party official Samir Safwat was killed outside his Baghdad home by gunmen in a car. A month earlier, two candidates standing in provincial elections held on January 31 were killed in Baghdad and Mosul.

Wednesday’s arrest comes less than two weeks ahead of a deadline by which US troops must withdraw from Iraq’s urban centres, as part of a landmark security accord between Washington and Baghdad under which all US troops will leave Iraq by the end of 2011.

Maliki has warned that insurgents and militias would likely step up their attacks in the coming weeks in a bid to undermine confidence in Iraq’s own security forces.

Violence has dropped markedly in Iraq in recent months, with May seeing the lowest Iraqi death toll since the 2003 invasion. But attacks remain common, particularly in Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul.

Al-Qaeda in Iraq was also blamed for a car bombing last week in a market in Batha, in the largely peaceful Dhi Qar province, that killed 19 people and wounded 56, the bloodiest attack in Iraq since May 20.

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The True Story Behind Pyschology’s Role in Torture?

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

A seventeen-year-old boy is locked in an interrogation cell in Guantanamo.

 He breaks down crying and says he wants his family. The interrogator senses the boy is psychologically vulnerable and consults with a psychologist. The psychologist has evaluated the boy prior to the questioning and says, “Tell him his family has forgotten him.” The psychologist also prescribes “linguistic isolation” (not letting him have contact with anyone who speaks his language.) The boy attempts suicide a few weeks later. On the eve of the boy’s trial, the psychologist apparently fearing her testimony will only further implicate her, indicates she will plead the Fifth Amendment if she is called to the stand. The trial is postponed, leaving the boy in further limbo. 

The military psychologist is merely a foot soldier in psychology’s participation in torture. It goes much deeper. We now know that psychologists helped design and implement significant segments of George Bush’s torture program.  Despite their credo, “Above all, do no harm,” two psychologists developed instruments of psychological torture. They “reversed engineered” psychological principles. They used the very therapeutic interventions psychologists use to ameliorate psychological suffering, but “reversed” their direction to create psychological distress and instability.  If one’s reality sense is threatened, a good therapist validates and supports it as appropriate. In reverse engineering, the environment is deliberately made more confusing and the victim’s trust in his own perceptions is intentionally undermined.  In extreme form, this can ultimately drive a person to insanity from which some never come back. These were the types of techniques that were used on the seventeen-year-old detainee and others.

Military psychologists also colluded with the Justice Department to help CIA operatives circumvent the legal prohibitions against torture. Under the Justice Department definition of torture, if a detainee was sent to a psychologist for a mental health evaluation prior to interrogation it was per se evidence that the interrogator had no legal intent to torture the detainee because the referral “demonstrated concern” for the welfare of the detainee.

Most remarkably of all, this whole process occurred under a protective “ethical” seal from the American Psychological Association (APA), psychologists’ largest national organization. The APA governance repeatedly rejected calls from its membership for APA to join other health organizations in declaring participation in Bush detention center interrogations unethical.

Most psychologists are appalled at what the APA has done, and many, like me, have resigned from the APA. But the true story behind APA’s involvement with torture has not been fully told.

I have had ample opportunity to observe both the inner workings of the APA and the personalities and organizational vicissitudes that have affected it over the last two decades. For most of the twenty-year period from 1983 to 2003, I either worked inside the APA central office as the first Executive Director of the APA Practice Directorate, or I served in various governance positions, including Chair of the APA Board of Professional Affairs and member of the APA Council of Representatives. Since leaving APA I have maintained a keen interest in the organization.

The transformation of APA, in the past decade, from a historically liberal organization to an authoritarian one that actively assists in torture has been an astonishing process.  As with many usurpations of democratic liberal values, the transformation was accomplished by a surprisingly small number of people. APA is an invaluable case study in the psychological manipulations that influence our governmental and non-governmental institutions.

To explain APA’s behavior two questions have to be answered. First, how did the APA develop the connections with the military that fostered the shameful role it has played in torture? Second, why did the APA governance not join other health professions in prohibiting participation in the Bush Administration’s “enhanced interrogations,” as APA’s rank and file members were demanding?

The APA-military connection   

One source of APA’s military connections is obvious to anyone who has worked at APA over the last twenty-five years.  Strangely, it has been overlooked by the media. Since the early 1980’s, APA has had a unique relationship with Hawaii Senator Daniel Inouye’s office. Inouye was an honored WWII veteran, a Japanese American who himself was a medical volunteer in the midst of the bombing of Pearl Harbor. He entered office in 1962. For much of the ‘70s, he was Chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Later he became, and is currently, the chair of the U.S. Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense, which, of course, makes up the largest chunk of federal discretionary spending and is why economists often split discretionary government funding into defense spending versus “everything else.” This appropriations committee covers not only all of the armed forces but the CIA as well. Put succinctly, Inouye controls the military purse strings, and is very influential with military brass. 

One of Inouye’s administrative assistants, psychologist Patrick Deleon, has long been active in the APA and served a term in 2000 as APA president. For significant periods of time DeLeon has literally directed APA staff on federal policy matters and has dominated the APA governance on political matters. For over twenty-five years, relationships between the APA and the Department of Defense (DOD) have been strongly encouraged and closely coordinated by DeLeon. 

Inouye himself has served as an apologist for the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (“Gitmo”) since the inception of the War on Terror. In a press briefing at the U.S. State Department, held shortly after his trip to Gitmo in February of 2002, Inouye affirmed Rumsfeld’s propagandist vision of the site, and then remarked:  “Watching our men and women treat these detainees was rather impressive. They would go out of their way to be considerate. …” 

From what we know now, that is true, but not in the benevolent way Inouye implied. Inouye’s comments bore a chilling similarity to Barbara Bush’s famous comments about the alleged good fortune of Katrina victims, in the Houston Astrodome. The detainees, he said, are being treated “in some ways better than we treat our people.” (R. Burns, Associated Press, 2002). And he compared the Guantanamo climate to Hawaii’s. (It is “somewhat warmer.”)

More significantly, it was Inouye who recently stripped the funding needed for closing Gitmo from a supplemental appropriations bill. This “Inouye Amendment,” threw a stick in the spokes of any U.S. movement away from the worst of global war on terror policies. In announcing the funding cut, Inouye’s press release was a remarkable illustration of Orwellian “newspeak,” ostensibly supporting the very opposite of what he was doing

But let me be clear. We need to close the Guantanamo prison. Yes, it is a fine facility. I, too, have visited the site. Yes, the detainees are being well cared for. Our servicemen and servicewomen are doing great work. But the fact of the matter is Guantanamo is a symbol of the wrongdoings which have occurred, and we must eliminate that connection. (Inouye, Press Release May 20, 2009).

DeLeon’s connection with Inouye is not by any means the only APA connection with defense interests. In 1951 the military established The Human Resource Research Organization (HumRRO) to develop techniques for “psychological warfare.” HumRRO was run by psychologist Dr. Meredith Crawford who spent ten years as APA treasurer and was deeply involved in APA activities for three decades. Crawford’s former student, Raymond Fowler, became Chief Executive Officer of APA in 1989 and stayed in that position until 2003. Today, fifty-five percent of HumRRO’s budget comes from the military.

As CEO, Fowler hired his two most important lieutenants from HumRRO, Chief Financial Officer, Charles “Jack” McKay, and in-house attorney, James McHugh. Both men have now, after lengthy APA tenures, left the APA and returned to HumRRO in  very senior roles. McHugh is Chairman of the HumRRO Board of Trustees and McKay is Vice-Chairman and Treasurer. The current President of HumRRO, psychologist William Strickland, has been an outspoken supporter of APA’s policies on the torture issue. He served on the APA Council of Representatives throughout the APA deliberations on torture.

Whether and how the longstanding relationships and frequent circulation of key personnel between APA and HumRRO positions have shaped APA’s involvement with the military is unclear, but given recent events, it certainly warrants more careful scrutiny than it has received from psychologists. In fact, I do not believe many psychologists are even aware of these relationships.

Regardless of HumRRO’s role, however, as psychologists, most APA governance members have little Washington political experience. For them, Patrick DeLeon, because of his connection with Inouye, is perceived as a canny psychology politician and political force on Capitol Hill. Regardless of the accuracy of that perception, I have no reason to think DeLeon is a corrupt or evil person. Instead, from my perspective, the most interesting aspect of DeLeon has always been his apparent preoccupation with issues of status for psychologists, irrespective of the issues’ actual significance either for psychologists or the public.

DeLeon wanted to make sure a psychologist, not just physicians, for example, would be eligible to fill this or that position in the Veteran’s Administration, and he campaigned for years for VA psychologists to receive a minuscule pay increase when they became board certified. On the whole, I found these matters harmless and of at least some marginal benefit to people. Using funding from the Department of Defense he has also launched a campaign for psychologists to be given legal rights to prescribe psychiatric medications.

The torture issue is, of course, quite different. Viewed through the eyes of DeLeon’s adherents, psychology’s new found role as architects of a central component of the war on terror was a tremendous “victory” for the field of psychology. That it involved torture was peripheral, obscured by the headiness of being involved in high-level, important, clandestine government affairs. In discussions about APA’s role in the interrogations, a senior member of the APA governance described himself as “addicted” to the television show 24. Now he had his own reality TV show.

DeLeon’s influence in the APA and with many individual psychologists, especially those from Hawaii, came in very handy for Inouye in his efforts to support the Department of Defense.  When the military needed a mental health professional to help implement its interrogation procedures, and the other professions subsequently refused to comply, the military had a friend in Senator Inouye’s office, one that could reap the political dividends of seeds sown by DeLeon over many years.

While we are only now uncovering the names of the individuals who participated most directly in the interrogations, I think a surprising number of them will turn out to be people brought into the military through Inouye’s office, many by DeLeon himself.

APA’s Organizational Decline

But this leads to the second and more complex question. Why did the governance of the APA let this happen under the apparent imprimatur of the world’s largest organization of psychologists? Some people assume APA’s horrifying recent behavior involved large sums of money changing hands. I could certainly be wrong, but I think the more likely (and more remarkable and pressing) mechanism has little to do with money.  For reasons described below, the APA leaders who were making these decisions simply exercised judgment that was both bad and insensitive to the realities of human suffering. In my opinion, schooled by 25 years of experience with the APA, it was neither greed nor financial corruption that brought the APA governance into alliance with the Bush Administration. Instead, it was a malignant organizational grandiosity that first weakened the APA and then, ultimately, allowed military and intelligence agencies to have their way with the APA throughout the Bush Administration.

But how did the APA, of all organizations, get this way? What led to this grandiose culture? An organization does not rise or fall with a single event any more than the fall of Rome truly occurred in 476 AD.  The culture of grandiosity was carefully cultivated for more than a decade by a few self-interested individuals.

What has been observable and unarguable about the APA of recent years is that the pluralistic and multi-faceted governance process I witnessed when first entering the APA in the early 1980’s was sharply curtailed during the 1990’s. Differences of opinion disappeared, and the APA suffered a terrible organizational decline. Increasingly inbred and infantilized under the tightly controlled administration of Raymond Fowler, the association agenda was primarily and at times exclusively financial, focused on making money either through real estate ventures or through what I and others felt was the unnecessarily harsh financial treatment of lower level APA employees.

Whatever one’s view of APA, few can dispute that Fowler, more than any other individual, made APA what it is today. The CEO of APA for almost fifteen years, Fowler served in one capacity or another on the APA Board of Directors for twenty-five consecutive years. While his supporters would characterize him as “astute” and his critics as “devious,” few could reasonably disagree that Fowler was the main mover in the APA for the fifteen years leading up to the torture debacle.

Most peculiarly, Fowler’s “agenda” for APA was encapsulated in the phrase “Working Together,” a noble idea that to the best of my knowledge was never attached to any actual substantive agenda. Instead, it served as a means of social control, a subtle injunction against raising any of the conflict-laden issues, challenges, or ideas that need to be addressed in any vital and accountable organization. The governance of the APA became either conformist or placid and increasingly detached from the real world.

The result was that much of the activity of the APA Council of Representatives, the legislative group with ultimate authority in the APA governance, turned away from substantive matters into an odd system of fawning over one another. Many members appeared to simply bathe in the good feeling that came from “working together.” The bath was characterized by grandiose self-referents and shared lofty opinions of one another. As it became more and more detached from reality, the organizational dysfunction became more pronounced, but this was ignored and obscured by the self-congratulatory organizational style. During this period, isolated dissent from rank-and-file members was stifled with a heavy-handed letter from the APA attorney threatening legal action or by communications from prominent members of the APA governance threatening “ethics” charges if policy protests were not discontinued. (It is unethical for psychologists to lie, and I can attest that one former APA president concluded that disagreeing with him was per se “lying.”) 

Deliberations on Torture

This same grandiosity was ubiquitous in the governance’s rhetoric at the heart of the Association’s discussions on torture. Banning psychologists’ participation in reputed torture mills was clearly unnecessary, proponents of the APA policy argued.  To do so would be an “insult” to military psychologists everywhere. No psychologist would ever engage in torture. Insisting on a change in APA policy reflected a mean-spirited attitude toward the military psychologists. The supporters of the APA policy managed to transform the military into the victims in the interrogation issue.

In the end, however, it was psychologists’ self-assumed importance that carried the day on the torture issue. Psychologists’ participation in these detention centers, it was asserted, was an antidote to torture, since psychologists’ very presence could protect the potential torture victims (presumably from Rumsfeld and Cheney, no less!). The debates on the APA Council floor, year after year, concluded with the general consensus that, indeed, psychology was very, very important to our nation’s security.

We psychologists were both too good and too important to join our professional colleagues in other professions who were taking an absolutist moral position against one of the most shameful eras in our country’s history. While the matter was clearly orchestrated by others, it was this self-reinforcing grandiosity that led the traditionally liberal APA governance down the slippery slope to the Bush Administration’s torture program.

During this period I had numerous personal communications with members of the APA governance structure in an attempt to dissuade them from ignoring the rank-and-file psychologists who abhorred the APA’s position.  I have been involved in many policy disagreements over the course of my career, but the smugness and illogic that characterized the response to these efforts were astonishing and went far beyond normal, even heated, give and take. Most dramatically, the intelligence that I have always found to characterize the profession of psychology was sorely lacking.

Outside the self-absorbed culture of the current APA governance, to the rest of the world, the APA arguments simply do not pass the red-face test for credibility. Instead, their transparent disingenuousness only made the APA sound embarrassingly like apologists for the Bush Administration. 

The Conclusion

The inability to deliberate rationally on the torture issue was but the tragic denouement of an organizational process that was actually set in motion in the early 1990’s, largely to serve the convenience of a very small number of individuals. As a result of the management style of the 90’s, the governance of APA was ill prepared for thoughtful deliberation on a matter as important as the torture issue. The governance was simply over its head in trying to effectively address such a socially and ethically consequential issue. This was especially true in a debate in which one side had organized support from powerful military interests, then-current APA presidents like Gerald Koocher and Ronald Levant, and Senator Inouye’s office all pushing for APA involvement in the interrogations. Few people stood up to them, and those who did were people who were inexperienced in the duplicity and manipulative style of politics that characterized APA.

With the increasing uproar from the membership and the media, APA’s more recently elected leaders and the current CEO, Norman Anderson, have been extraordinarily quiet on the subject of psychologist and APA involvement in the torture issue. Instead, second level APA employees have been put out front to defend the APA position to the membership and to the public. These are almost exclusively people hired by Fowler to fit into his carefully designed model of an organization that would be controllable, if somewhat non-dynamic and uncreative. Thus, the public relations staff Fowler hired, the staff legal and psychological expertise he hired, and most remarkably his ethics director have all served as the “face of APA” on the torture issue in recent years. Not surprisingly, forced to function under the watchful eye of the public they have not acquitted themselves in credible fashion.

In a recent book, I used several organizational examples to illustrate that many of the same techniques of political manipulation used in the Bush Administration were used in other organizational settings. Many of those examples were drawn from the APA. At the time of writing I never dreamed the techniques would lead to APA’s complicity in torture.

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Police Abusing Anti-Terror Laws

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

RINF NEWS

Today it has been reported that British police have been abusing anti-terror laws on members of the public in order to provide “racial balance” in stop and search statistics under Section 44 of the Terrorism Act 2000, which  allows police to stop and search anyone without suspicion that a crime or offence has been commited.

Liberal Democrat peer and QC, Lord Carlile, condemned the abuse of powers in his annual report on anti-terror laws.

Lor Carlile said: “I have evidence of cases where the person stopped is so obviously far from any known terrorism profile that, realistically, there is not the slightest possibility of him/her being a terrorist, and no other feature to justify the stop.

“In one situation the basis of the stops was numerical only, which is almost certainly unlawful and in no way an intelligent use of the procedure.

“I believe it is totally wrong for any person to be stopped in order to produce a racial balance in the Section 44 statistics. There is ample anecdotal evidence this is happening.

“I can well understand the concerns of the police that they should be free from allegations of prejudice, but it is not a good use of precious resources if they waste them on self-evidently unmerited searches.

“It is also an invasion of the civil liberties of the person who has been stopped, simply to ‘balance’ the statistics.

“The criteria for section 44 stops should be objectively based, irrespective of racial considerations: if an objective basis happens to produce an ethnic imbalance, that may have to be regarded as a proportional consequence of operational policing.”

He continued: ”I cannot see a justification for the whole of the Greater London area being covered permanently, and the intention of the section was not to place London under permanent special search powers.

“The figures, and a little analysis of them, show that section 44 is being used as an instrument to aid non-terrorism policing on some occasions, and this is unacceptable. I repeat my mantra that terrorism-related powers should be used only for terrorism-related purposes; otherwise their credibility is severely damaged.” “I am sure it could safely be used far less. There is little or no evidence that the use of Section 44 has the potential to prevent an act of terrorism as compared with other statutory powers of stop and search.”

Use of Section 44 by officers in London is up by 266% and is used between 8,000 and 10,000 times a month.

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Report Finds Government Big Brother Plans Overly Intrusive

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

RINF NEWS

A new study from experts at the London School of Economics (LSE) has found that government plans to monitor our Internet communications could cause a massive burden on networks and has been called overly intrusive.

ISPs and phone companies already have to store our communications data for 12 months.

The new plan will allow the government to access third party overseas providers such as Hotmail, Yahoo and Gmail which means authorities can examine our entire Internet activity and phone calls.

“We are concerned that the Home Office is contemplating a dramatic enhancement in surveillance powers and increase in regulatory burdens placed upon communications service providers,” says the report.

“What is being proposed under these modernisation powers is that every communication transaction, and all forms of future transactions, is now suspicious, worthy of later consideration by the police.”

It adds: “This is a phase change not only in communications surveillance, but in the power of surveillance by government itself.”

The report exploses a brief history the interception of communications dating back to 1660.

The report continues: “Although there is a case for the new powers, a thorough analysis of all citizensʼ communication traffic data would radically transform British society. Private meetings would be a thing of the past. This would be akin to having to notify the government of all the people you met with last night, in order to give them the opportunity to choose whether they want to retrospectively read any conversation transcripts that may be available. This has profound implications for the ability to associate free from surveillance.

“Political campaigning and political organising would be radically transformed. Political actors would be under constant scrutiny, regardless of whether their communications data is actually being physically read by an individual.

“As the general public becomes aware of the practice of collecting and collating all this personal information, the risk is that it will generate a chilling effect on the individual’s right to free expression, association and might dissuade people from participating in communications transactions. Already, following from the media coverage of the Government ‘wanting to get access to social networking profiles’ there has been a rising concern about what people do or say on social networking sites.”

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EU needs to tell the truth about renditions

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

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Scientology Broadcasts TV Ad

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

RINF NEWS

The Church of Scientology is broadcasting a TV advert aimed at re-branding the group, who are often accused of human rights violations including child abuse and conspiracy to murder.

The Church of Scientology are buying spots on CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360, and the 30 second ad appears to be aimed at people who feel unfulfilled and depressed.

“Some of us have been looking their whole lives. Most don’t even know what they are looking for, but we all feel it … that unexplainable emptiness that can only be filled by one thing … the truth,” states the ad.

It’s unclear how long the ad has been running but the Alexa Internet traffic monitoring site notes an increase of hits to the Scientology web site since May from a 0.001% share of all Internet traffic to 0.02%.

Reports suggest that Peaches Geldof, a British socialite and daughter of Bob Geldof, is set to join the Church after she was spotted leaving the Scientology Celebrity Centre in Hollywood.

One of Scientology’s beliefs is that each human being is full of “Thetans”, the dead souls of an alien race.

Beam me up Scotty.

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Companies Warned Not To Sign ID Card Contracts

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

RINF NEWS

The controversial and unpopular ID card scheme, due to be implimented by 2012, might never see the light of day according to the Shadow Home Secretary, Chris Grayling.

Mr Grayling has contacted five companies chosen to bid for Identity Cards contracts warning them to not sign any further contracts with the government as he fears the possibility of  ”quite big penalty costs” being written in to prevent the cancellation of the scheme, which leaves a “substantial bill” for the taxpayer.

The Tory party have promised to scrap ID cards if elected  in the next general election.

Mr Grayling said: “We intend to scrap the ID Card project as one of our first acts if we are successful at the election.

“I am increasingly concerned that the Government is putting in place contractual arrangements that are designed to tie the hands of a future Government, and I want to make the contractors absolutely aware that we do not intend to complete this work.”

He also added: “I want companies to be cautious and recognise that if they invest large amounts of money preparing for this business, it may not happen.”

ID cards, biometric passports and the national identity register is expected to cost more than £5 billion. Ministers estimate that scrapping the cards would cost £40 million.

The government insists the project is still on track.

A Home Office spokesman said: “It is a decision for the government of the day to determine whether to invoke such clauses but equally it would be wholly inappropriate to do so on the basis of opposition policy.

“The Home Secretary has made clear the Government remains fully committed to bringing forward measures to protect people’s identity that have widespread public support.”

The project has attracted attention from human rights campaigners who have organised nationwide protests since the idea was introduced several years ago.

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Empty Evidence: The Stories Of The Saudis Released From Guantanamo

Wednesday, June 17th, 2009

At the end of a hectic week at Guantánamo, which saw the Obama administration overcome its previous inability to release prisoners (just two were released from January to May), it was announced that, following the release of four Uighurs to Bermuda, the return of Guantánamo’s youngest prisoner, Mohammed El-Gharani, to Chad, and the repatriation of the last Iraqi in Guantánamo, three Saudi prisoners had also been repatriated, leaving 230 men at the prison.

As I explained in March, the release of the Saudis was long overdue, because military review boards, convened on an annual basis under the Bush administration, had approved their release from Guantánamo, having concluded that they were no longer a threat to the U.S. (although it is also worth noting that they did not necessarily pose a threat in the first place). As a result, there appeared to be no excuse for the men not to be returned to the custody of the Saudi government, which has been running a well-respected rehabilitation program for former prisoners for several years.

In the case of one of these men, Khalid Saad Mohammed (who was 28 years old when seized), the decision to approve his transfer from Guantánamo had taken place in 2006, but no explanation was provided as to why he was not released when 63 other Saudis were repatriated in 2007, especially as he had so clearly been seized by mistake.

In the publicly available documents from Guantánamo, he explained that he had traveled to Pakistan to provide humanitarian aid to Afghan refugees fleeing the chaos of Afghanistan, following the U.S.-led invasion and the fall of the Taliban, and was injured while buying food and supplies for the refugees in a market at Spin Boldak, on the Pakistani border, when U.S. forces began bombing the area.

He was then seized from a hospital in Quetta, Pakistan, by Pakistani forces, and sold, with a number of other wounded men, to the U.S. military, but the authorities in Guantánamo had never managed to build up anything resembling a credible case against him, resorting instead to claims that he “was identified” by another, unnamed prisoner as having stayed at a guest house in Afghanistan, and that an unidentified “senior al-Qaeda member” had identified him as “possibly having clerical status amongst Saudi fighters.”

The first allegation is worrying, because, as recent court cases dealing with the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions have demonstrated (see the stories of the Uighurs, the Bosnian Algerians, Mohammed El-Gharani and the recent case of a Yemeni, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, discussed below), the authorities have frequently resorted to relying on claims made by other prisoners whose reliability has been called into question by military personnel and agents from the intelligence services.

The second allegation is just as troubling, because the unidentified “senior al-Qaeda member” could have been one of the supposed “high-value detainees” — including Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed — who were held for many years in secret CIA prisons, where they were subjected to torture, and who, as documents released to the ACLU have just demonstrated, both stated in Guantánamo that they made false confessions as a result.

The second prisoner released is Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, whose case I wrote about just a month ago, in an article entitled, “Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies.” He was one of 17 men seized in a guest house in Faisalabad, Pakistan on March 28, 2002, ostensibly because the house had some tangential connection to Abu Zubaydah, although, as I discussed in my book The Guantánamo Files, there appeared to be little or no evidence connecting the men seized in the house — mostly Yemenis, and mostly aged between 18 and 24 — to Zubaydah or to any kind of terrorist activity.

Most of the men stated that they were students, and that the house functioned as a university dorm for the nearby Salafia University. Al-Noofayee, who was 25 years old at the time of his capture, had a slightly different story, as he explained in Guantánamo, but this too had no connection whatsoever with terrorism or militancy. Like another house guest (Mohammed Salam, a Yemeni), he said that he had traveled to Pakistan to receive medical treatment — specifically, for a back problem — and had never set foot in Afghanistan.

As with most of the prisoners seized in the guest house, the U.S. authorities had struggled, in the years following his capture, to come up with anything resembling evidence to justify his detention, and, in fact, had managed to produce only two pieces of information, neither of which appeared to be remotely reliable. The first was that an unidentified “senior al-Qaeda operative” — under the same unknown circumstances as Khalid Saad Mohammed’s accuser — had stated that al-Noofayee had attended the Khaldan training camp in Afghanistan “in approximately 1997,” and the second was that he “was captured with a Casio F-91W watch,” allegedly “used in bombings that have been linked to al-Qaeda and radical Islamic groups with improvised explosive devices,” a ludicrous allegation which, nevertheless, has been leveled at dozens of prisoners over the years.

As with the majority of the Guantánamo cases, it was, until last year, impossible for al-Noofayee’s lawyers to challenge the basis of his detention, but last June, after the Supreme Court ruled in a historic case, Boumediene v. Bush, that the prisoners had habeas corpus rights (in other words, the right to ask a judge why they were being held), his case — like those of the majority of the Guantánamo prisoners (except a handful who, either by accident or design, had not secured a habeas lawyer) — was assigned to a District Court judge, whose intention, under the directions provided by the Supreme Court, was to ensure that, after six and a half years of detention without adequate review, “The costs of delay are no longer borne by those who are held in custody.”

It was a worthy aim, but on the first anniversary of Boumediene (last Friday), only 29 cases had been decided. In 25 of these, judges had ruled that the government had failed to establish a case against the prisoners concerned. This is an 86 percent success rate, which is a vindication for those, like myself, who have maintained for years that the cases against the majority of the prisoners would not stand up to any kind of independent scrutiny, but it is disappointing that so few cases have been heard, and more disappointing still to realize that the main reason for the delay is obstruction by the Justice Department.

When a schedule for hearing the cases was first established last July, the Justice Department resorted to delaying tactics almost immediately, first by complaining that it was understaffed to deal with the task, and that it needed more time to compile allegations against the prisoners (despite having already had six and a half years to do so). The DoJ followed up with what appears to be a systemic failure to provide the prisoners’ defense attorneys with exculpatory material — in other words, material that tended to disprove the government’s claims — or, in fact, any of the material they required to mount a successful defense. More disturbing still is the realization that this policy of obstruction did not change at all when Barack Obama and Eric Holder took over from George W. Bush and Michael Mukasey.

Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, like Khalid Saad Mohammed, left Guantánamo a year after Boumediene without having had the opportunity to have his case heard in a U.S. court, but he at least had the opportunity to hear about the success in court of one of the other men seized with him, Alla Ali Bin Ali Ahmed, a Yemeni student whose habeas case was heard last month by Judge Gladys Kessler. I described this ruling in an article at the time, entitled “Judge Condemns ‘Mosaic’ Of Guantánamo Intelligence, And Unreliable Witnesses,” and summarized it as follows in “Guantánamo: A Prison Built On Lies”:

Authorizing Ali Ahmed’s habeas claim, Judge Kessler demolished the government’s case against him, painting a disturbing picture of unreliable allegations made by other prisoners who were tortured, coerced, bribed or suffering from mental health issues, and a “mosaic” of intelligence, purporting to rise to the level of evidence, which actually relied, to an intolerable degree, on second- or third-hand hearsay, guilt by association and unsupportable suppositions.

Moreover, although Judge Kessler was ruling only on Ali Ahmed’s habeas case, she made it clear that, in her review of the government’s supposed evidence, she had also concluded that identical problems plagued the cases of the majority of the other men seized in the guest house. “It is likely, based on evidence in the record,” she wrote, “that at least a majority of the [redacted] guests were indeed students, living at a guest house that was located close to a university.”

For Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee, Judge Kessler’s conclusion no longer addresses the question of whether he will ever be released, but it’s noticeable, as the Obama administration finally begins to free prisoners from Guantánamo, that the rest of the men seized in the Faisalabad guest house, who are still held, have not yet received any confirmation that senior officials have taken Judge Kessler’s criticisms on board.

There is, moreover, no word from the administration about its plans for three other Saudi prisoners who were also cleared for release after military review boards at Guantánamo, but in the end what is revealed most of all through the story of Khalid Saad Mohammed, Abdul Aziz al-Noofayee and the third released prisoner, Ahmed Zuhair (who will be discussed in an article to follow) is that the Obama administration not only dawdled on taking office when it should have acted swiftly to release prisoners whose repatriation posed no difficulties, but also that these delays prevented President Obama from seizing a priceless opportunity to refute the damaging propaganda of former Vice President Dick Cheney and the many politicians who have jumped on his fearmongering bandwagon, and who, as a result, have not only derailed the President’s plan to raise funds to close Guantánamo, but have also succeeded in putting their distortions back in the headlines, where they most emphatically do not belong.

The irony is that, while Obama did little to counter this unprincipled attack on his promise to close Guantánamo, he could have fought back by simply stating that he did not have time to address Cheney’s lies and distortions about the “hardcore terrorists” still in Guantánamo, because he was too busy ensuring that prisoners who did not pose a threat to the United States, and never had, were being released after their long, cruel and pointless ordeal at the hands of his predecessors.

Obama’s failure to do so has made his mission far more complicated than was necessary, and he is still playing from a defensive position, by refusing to state categorically why nine prisoners were released in the last week (because the courts found that the Bush administration had failed to provide evidence to justify the men’s detention, or because his own inter-departmental review reached the same conclusion), but at least while prisoners are being released the public has some opportunity to understand the lies peddled by Dick Cheney, nearly eight years after he embarked on his aberrant assault on America’s core values.

Andy Worthington is the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press), and maintains one of the most important blogs of our time.

Have Your Say: Empty Evidence: The Stories Of The Saudis Released From Guantanamo
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