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Cheney ‘ordered CIA to hide plan’

Sunday, July 12th, 2009

Former US Vice-President Dick Cheney gave direct orders to the CIA to conceal an intelligence programme from Congress, US media reports say.

The existence of the programme, set up after 9/11, was hidden for eight years and even now its nature is not known.

CIA director Leon Panetta is said to have abandoned the project when he learnt of it last month.

He has now told a House committee that Mr Cheney was behind the secrecy, the unnamed US sources say.

There has been no comment from Mr Cheney.

War of words

The claims come amid an increasingly bitter row between the CIA and Congress over whether key information was withheld about other aspects of the agency’s operations.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has claimed that the CIA misled her about interrogation methods including waterboarding, while other senior Democrats have quoted Mr Panetta as admitting that his agency regularly misled Congress before he took office.

Details of the newly-revealed secret programme have still not been divulged, but sources say it did not relate to the CIA’s rendition programme, interrogation methods or a controversial domestic surveillance project.

Officials quoted by the New York Times say the programme was launched by anti-terror operatives at the CIA soon after the 2001 attacks, and involved planning and training but never became fully operational.

Another unnamed official told AP it was an embryonic intelligence-gathering effort, aimed at yielding intelligence that would be used to conduct covert operations abroad.

Sources have told a number of US media outlets Mr Cheney personally instructed the CIA to withhold information about the programme from Congress.

Mr Panetta - who took over directorship of the CIA under President Obama’s administration - is said to have learnt about the programme only on 23 June.

The next day he called an emergency meeting with congressional intelligence committees to tell them about its existence and to say that it was being cancelled, the reports say.

Veto threat

The allegations come as Democrats in Congress are trying to push through new rules that would increase the number of members of Congress who are told about covert operations.

The White House is threatening to veto the bill, fearing that operational secrecy could be compromised.

The CIA has not commented on the reports of Mr Cheney’s role.

“It’s not agency practice to discuss what may or may not have been said in a classified briefing,” said spokesman Paul Gimigliano.

“When a CIA unit brought this matter to Director Panetta’s attention, it was with the recommendation that it be shared appropriately with Congress. That was also his view, and he took swift, decisive action to put it into effect.”

A CIA spokesman insisted earlier this week that “it is not the policy or practice of the CIA to mislead Congress.”

BBC

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Secret Program Fuels CIA-Congress Dispute

Friday, July 10th, 2009

Four months after he was sworn in, CIA Director Leon E. Panetta learned of an intelligence program that had been hidden from Congress since 2001, a revelation that prompted him to immediately cancel the initiative and schedule a pair of closed-door meetings on Capitol Hill.

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CIA torture report delayed again

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009

The US Justice Department is again delaying the release of an internal CIA report on the agency’s secret detention and interrogation program during the Bush administration.

The report had been expected to be made public two weeks ago but was held back over debates about how much of it should be censored. The government published a version of the report in 2008, but its contents were almost entirely blacked out.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs told reporters on Wednesday that the report, expected to be made public in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union, may not be released this week.

The report was written in 2004 by the CIA’s inspector general.

The review questioned the effectiveness of harsh interrogation methods employed by CIA interrogators, such as waterboarding.

That is according to references to the report contained in Bush-era Justice Department memos that were declassified earlier this year.

 

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CIA Looks to Colleges for Future Spies

Monday, June 22nd, 2009

To the list of collegiate types — nerds, jocks, Greeks — add one more: spies in training. The government is hoping they’ll be hard to spot.

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Delay in Releasing CIA Report Is Sought

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

Justice Dept. Wants More Time to Review IG’s Findings on Detainee Treatment

by Carrie Johnson

The Justice Department needs a week to complete its review of a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report before releasing it in redacted form to civil liberties advocates, officials said yesterday.

Government lawyers notified the American Civil Liberties Union of the delay yesterday afternoon, citing a longer-than-expected review process at the CIA. Activists requested the report as part of a longstanding Freedom of Information Act lawsuit focusing on the U.S. government’s detention and treatment of terrorism suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

CIA officials sought to redact many sensitive and classified elements of the lengthy report, including details about the use of waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other harsh measures against detainees. The report by the agency’s internal watchdog raised questions about the legality of the CIA’s strategy and ignited a fierce debate within the agency and the Bush administration after it was completed five years ago.

Tension over how much to disclose in the fight against terrorism continues to roil the highest levels of the Obama administration. After a behind-the-scenes fight, authorities released earlier this year four memos by the Bush Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel that paved the way for information-gathering techniques that critics assert are torture. But at the urging of Defense Department officials, the White House has sought to bar the release of photos depicting detainee abuse on the ground that they could incite violence against U.S. forces.

The report is the most definitive official account to date of the CIA’s interrogation system. A heavily redacted version, consisting of a dozen or so paragraphs separated by heavy black boxes and lists of missing pages, was released in May 2008 in response to the ACLU lawsuit. The broad conclusions of the report, as well as its specific assertion that some interrogators exceeded limits approved by the Justice Department, have been disclosed.

Administration officials have been cool to the idea of a congressionally chartered “truth commission” that would explore the origins and effects of the interrogation program. But they have repeatedly been forced to respond to lawsuits they inherited, filed by interest groups that seek sensitive government documents from the Bush era.

New leaders at the Justice Department generally lean toward disclosure, but they are playing a secondary role in the case of the CIA inspector general’s report because they did not have a hand in investigating or preparing the report.

Amrit Singh, an ACLU lawyer, said the group is disappointed by the delay. “We can only hope that this delay is a sign that the forces of transparency within the Obama administration are winning over the forces of secrecy and that the report will ultimately be released with minimal redactions,” she said. “The CIA should not be permitted to use national security as a pretext for suppressing evidence of its own unlawful conduct.”

CIA spokesman George Little said the process “is working just as it should.” He rejected the ACLU’s allegations of suppressed evidence as “wrong and offensive.”

Joby Warrick contributed to this report.

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CIA Secrecy on Drone Attacks Data Hides Abuses

Friday, June 12th, 2009

The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s refusal to share with other agencies even the most basic data on the bombing attacks by remote-controlled unmanned predator drones in Pakistan’s northwestern tribal region, combined with recent revelations that CIA operatives have been paying Pakistanis to identify the targets, suggests that managers of the drone attacks programmes have been using the total secrecy surrounding the programme to hide abuses and high civilian casualties.

By Gareth Porter |

Intelligence analysts have been unable to obtain either the list of military targets of the drone strikes or the actual results in terms of al Qaeda or civilians killed, according to a Washington source familiar with internal discussion of the drone strike programme. The source insisted on not being identified because of the extreme sensitivity of the issue.

“They can’t find out anything about the programme,” the source told IPS. That has made it impossible for other government agencies to judge its real consequences, according to the source.

Since early 2009, Barack Obama administration officials have been claiming that the predator attacks in Pakistan have killed nine of 20 top al Qaeda officials, but they have refused to disclose how many civilians have been killed in the strikes.

In April, The News, a newspaper in Lahore, Pakistan, published figures provided by Pakistani officials indicating that 687 civilians have been killed along with 14 al Qaeda leaders in some 60 drone strikes since January 2008 – just over 50 civilians killed for every al Qaeda leader.

A paper published this week by the influential pro-military Centre for a New American Security (CNAS) criticising the Obama administration’s use of drone attacks in Pakistan says U.S. officials “vehemently dispute” the Pakistani figures but offers no further data on the programme.

In an interview with IPS, Nathaniel C. Fick, the chief operating officer of CNAS, who coauthored the paper, said Pentagon officials claim privately that 300 al Qaeda fighters have been killed in the drone attacks. However, those officials refuse to stipulate further just who they have included under that rubric, according to Fick, and have not offered any figure on civilian deaths.

What is needed is “a strict definition of the target set – a definition of who is al Qaeda,” said Fick.

Press reports that the CIA is paying Pakistani agents for identifying al Qaeda targets by placing electronic chips at farmhouses supposedly inhabited by al Qaeda officials, so they can be bombed by predator planes, has raised new questions about whether the CIA and the Obama administration have simply redefined al Qaeda in order to cover up an abusive system and justify the programme.

The initial story on the CIA payments for placing the chips by Carol Grisanti and Mushtaq Yusufzai of NBC News Apr. 17 was based on a confession by a 19-year-old in North Waziristan on a video released by the Taliban. In his confession, the young man says, “I was given 122 dollars to drop chips wrapped in a cigarette paper at al Qaida and Taliban houses. If I was successful, I was told, I would be given thousands of dollars.”

He goes on to say, “I thought this was a very easy job. The money was so good so I started throwing the chips all over. I knew people were dying because of what I was doing, but I needed the money.”

The video shows the man being shot as a spy for the United States.

A U.S. official told NBC news that the video was “extremist propaganda,” but a story in The Guardian May 31 said residents of Waziristan, including one student identified as Taj Muhammad Wazir, had confirmed that tribesman have been paid to lay the electronic devices to target drone strikes.

The knowledgeable Washington source told IPS the Guardian article is consistent with past CIA intelligence-gathering methods in Afghanistan and elsewhere. “We buy data,” he said. “Everything is paid for.”

The implication of the system of purchasing targeting information for drone strikes is that there is “no guarantee” that the people being targeted are officials of al Qaeda or allied organisations, he said.

Fick, who is a veteran of the post-9/11 military operations in Afghanistan and the early phase of the Iraq war, said that kind of intelligence for targeting is “intrinsically problematic”.

Although the CNAS paper by Fick, Andrew Exum and David Kilcullen does not explicitly call for ending drone attacks, it is highly critical of the programme, charging that the use of drones represents a “tactic… substituting for a strategy”.

It concedes that, by “killing key leaders and hampering operations”, the drone attacks against al Qaeda and some other militants in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) “create a sense of insecurity among militants and constrain their interactions with suspected informers”.

But it argues that the drone attacks have also “created a siege mentality among the Pashtun population in northwest Pakistan”, and likened them to similar strikes against Islamic militants in Somalia in 2005-2006. The net result of those earlier strikes, the authors assert, was to anger the population and make the Islamic insurgents more popular.

The drone strikes in Pakistan are having a similar impact, not only in the tribal areas but in other provinces as well, the paper said. In a panel discussing the paper at the think tank’s annual meeting Thursday, Exum, a former officer in Afghanistan, said, “We are not saying that the drone strikes are not part of a solution, but right now they are part of the problem.”

The new CNAS criticism of drone strikes is of particular interest because of the close relationship between the think tank and CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, who was the keynote speaker at Thursday’s conference. The new president of CNAS, John Nagl, is a former adviser to Petraeus and co-author of the Army’s counterinsurgency manual. CNAS is widely regarded as reflecting the perspective of the Petraeus wing of the U.S. military.

Another co-author and former Petraeus aide, Australian David Kilcullen, who was also a senior fellow at CNAS last year, had already come out strongly against drone strikes as politically self-defeating.

However, Nagl himself told IPS that he disagrees with the CNAS paper’s position on drone strikes. He said he believes the benefits of the strikes are greater than have been publicly communicated by the administration, and suggested the failure to release any more figures on the results could be attributed to a “culture of secrecy”.

Petraeus made no mention of the issue in his presentation to the CNAS conference on Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Washington Post reported Jun. 1 that Petraeus wrote in a secret May 27 assessment, “Anti-U.S. sentiment has already been increasing in Pakistan… especially in regard to cross-border and reported drone strikes, which Pakistanis perceive to cause unacceptable civilian casualties.”

*Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist specialising in U.S. national security policy. The paperback edition of his latest book, “Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam”, was published in 2006.

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Amnesty International responds to CIA’s denial of Cheney’s request for documents’ release

Friday, May 15th, 2009

In response to today’s news from the Central Intelligence Agency that it was denying former Vice President Cheney’s request for the public release of two memos — on the basis that the documents are currently the subject of pending litigation, including a suit filed jointly under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) by Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice — the organizations released the following statements:

Tom Parker, counterterrorism expert with Amnesty International USA:

“The fact that Amnesty International USA, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice have submitted Freedom of Information Act requests to secure the release of these documents should obviously not be used as a pretext to withhold them. It is unusual for Amnesty International to find itself on the same side of an argument as the former Vice President Dick Cheney, but we welcome his late conversion to the value of transparency in government. The CIA should comply with the suit, stop stalling and make these documents public at the earliest possible opportunity.”

Gitanjali Gutierrez, attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights:

“A year ago under the Bush administration, the CIA argued that disclosure of this document and others would jeopardize national security. Cheney’s self-serving request now to share the information with the public makes clear that the CIA has been using pretexts to withhold information vital to the public debate about the CIA’s torture program. The agency should commit to telling the public what we demand to know.”

Margaret Satterthwaite, faculty director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law:

“Like Dick Cheney, we call on the CIA to immediately release these documents. Unlike him, however, we seek their disclosure to further transparency and oversight of an unlawful program. The CIA’s arguments of a year ago — that the documents could not be released because they pertained to an ongoing program — are no longer valid since the president ordered the program closed in January. The American public deserves to have the full details about this program and the CIA should not block the public’s attempt to learn the facts.”

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CIA Refuses to Turn Over Torture Tape Documents

Thursday, May 14th, 2009

The CIA claims the integrity of a special prosecutor’s criminal investigation into the destruction of 92 interrogation videotapes will be compromised if the agency is forced to turn over detailed documents to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) describing the contents of the tapes, according to newly released court documents.

In a May 5 letter to US District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein, Lev Dassin, the acting US attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the Justice Department recently had discussions with prosecutors working on the criminal investigation into the destruction of the interrogation tapes and was informed that “the production of documents … would conflict and substantially interfere with the [criminal] investigation” into the destruction of the interrogation tapes.

“As the court is aware, the scope of the tapes investigation includes the review of whether any person obstructed justice, knowingly made materially false statements, or acted in contempt of court or Congress in connection with the destruction of videotapes,” Dassin’s letter says. “The Government thus respectfully requests that [a previous court order demanding the CIA turn over detailed descriptions of the contents of the destroyed tapes] be withdrawn or otherwise stayed until the tapes investigation has been completed.”

Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney, said the move is “a classic CIA delay tactic.”

In court papers, she said the government is using the criminal investigation “as a pretext for indefinitely postponing” its obligation to produce documents related to the destruction of the videotapes.

“The Government makes no mention of an expected timeline for completion of [Special Prosecutor John] Durham['s] investigation,” the ACLU said in court papers. “Nor has Mr. Durham provided a declaration in support of the Government’s position.”

Hellerstein seemed to agree. He pointed out in a two-page order that Durham had not stepped forward to state that his probe would be hindered if documents related to the destruction of the tapes were turned over to the ACLU.

In fact, in a March court filing, Dassin noted that a stay of the contempt motion filed by the ACLU seeking release of the tapes was allowed to expire on February 28 without a request for a continuation - signaling that Durham’s investigation was complete. In January, Durham had indicated in a court filing that he expected to wrap up his probe by the end of February.

Last month, however, Durham questioned the CIA’s former number three official, Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, about the destruction of the tapes. Foggo, who was sentenced to three years in prison for fraud for steering lucrative contracts to a friend, was due to report to federal prison, but Durham asked for a delay so he could question him about the tape destruction.

In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for its destruction of the tapes in violation of a court order requiring the agency to produce or identify all records requested by the ACLU related to the CIA’s interrogation of “war on terror” detainees.

Hellerstein ordered the Justice Department, on behalf of the CIA, to file legal briefs by May 27 justifying the reasons for withholding the documents. He added that those papers should include affidavits, including a declaration from the special prosecutor investigating the tape destruction

Those documents “may include also any reasons why the identity of persons involved in the destruction should not be disclosed,” Hellerstein wrote in a two-page order.

Several weeks ago, Dassin revealed in another court filing that the CIA has about 3,000 documents related to the 92 destroyed videotapes, suggesting an extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and officials of the Bush administration. The Justice Department said the documents include “cables, memoranda, notes and e-mails” related to the destroyed CIA videotapes.

In last week’s court filing, Dassin said, “those 3,000 records included ‘contemporaneous records,’ which were created at the time of the interrogation or at the time the videotapes were viewed, ‘intelligence record,’ which do not describe the interrogations but contain raw intelligence collected from the interrogations, ‘derivative records,’ which summarize information contained within the contemporaneous records, and documents related to the location of the interrogations, that upon further review by the CIA, were determined not to relate to the interrogations or to the destroyed videotapes.”

The ACLU and the government have jointly proposed that the government describe the contents of the “contemporaneous” and “derivative” records, but not the intelligence records or the “other records that ultimately proved to be unrelated to the interrogations or the videotapes.”

Dassin said the Justice Department intends to turn over additional indexes next month, and on May 18 will produce a list of “all contemporaneous records and all derivative records” related to the destruction of the interrogation tapes, but he added that quite a bit of information will be withheld.

In previous court filings, Dassin acknowledged that 12 videotapes, showed Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, being subjected to waterboarding and other harsh methods. The 80 other videotapes purportedly show Zubaydah and al-Nashiri in their prison cells. Some of the videotapes predated the Justice Department’s August 1, 2002, legal memo authorizing CIA interrogators to use ten torturous methods against “high-value” detainees.

But it’s unknown whether the interrogation tapes that predate the August 1, 2002, “torture” depict “enhanced interrogation” techniques not yet approved by the Justice Department.

Last week, the CIA turned over to the ACLU documents that showed CIA interrogators at a secret “black site” prison provided top agency officials in Langley with daily “torture” updates of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-level” terrorist detainee, who was waterboarded 83 times in August 2002.

The documents included two sets of indexes (Part I) (Part II), totaling 52 pages that contained general descriptions of cables sent back to CIA headquarters describing the August 2002, videotaped interrogation sessions of Zubaydah. Those cable transmissions included a description of the techniques interrogators had used and the intelligence, if any, culled from those sessions.

The CIA and the Justice Department declined to turn over a more detailed description of the cables its field agents sent back to headquarters, citing several exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act.

In a two-page letter accompanying the indexes, CIA Associate General Counsel John McPherson wrote that a “senior government official” would submit a declaration on May 22 “that more fully explains the justifications for withholding a more detailed description of the cables.”

 

*************Jason Leopold is editor in chief of The Public Record, www.pubrecord.org

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CIA Officials Were Given Daily Torture Updates

Thursday, May 7th, 2009

By Jason Leopold |

CIA interrogators provided top agency officials in Langley with daily “torture” updates of Abu Zubaydah, the alleged “high-level” terrorist detainee who was held at a secret “black site” prison and waterboarded 83 times in August 2002, according to newly released court documents obtained by The Public Record.

The extensive back-and-forth between CIA field operatives and agency officials in Langley likely included updates provided to senior Bush administration officials.

The government documents filed May 1, with U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein include two sets of indexes totaling 52 pages and contain general descriptions of cables sent back to CIA headquarters describing the August 2002 videotaped interrogation sessions of Zubaydah. Those cable transmissions included a description of the techniques interrogators had used and the intelligence, if any, culled from those sessions.

An Aug. 1, 2002 Justice Department legal opinion released last month signed by Jay Bybee, the former head of the Office of Legal Counsel, described a “ticking time-bomb” scenario and “chatter” about a looming terrorist attack in justifying a list of 10 different brutal interrogation techniques the CIA requested to use against Zubaydah. Those interrogation methods included waterboarding, slamming his head repeatedly against a wall and forcing him to remain awake for as long as 11 consecutive days.

On the same day Bybee, now a federal appeals court judge, signed the memorandum CIA field operatives at the “black site” prison where Zubaydah was detained sent a two-page cable to agency headquarters that included detailed information “concerning the use of interrogation techniques; atmospherics and behavioral comments; a threat update; a medical update; and administrative and security notes.”

“The cable [marked top secret] also includes CIA organizational information, CIA filing information, locations of CIA facilities, and the names and/or identifying information of personnel engaged in counterterrorism operations,” according to a description of the cable.

Another document, describing a four-page cable sent back to CIA headquarters on Aug. 4, 2002, “includes information concerning the strategies for interrogation sessions… reactions to the interrogation techniques, raw intelligence, and a status of threat information.”

One the same day, according to the same set of indexes, CIA field operatives prepared a 59-page notebook that contained notes of the interrogations, which contained “handwritten notes concerning treatment and conduct of interrogations; reactions to the interrogation techniques; specific intelligence topics concerning terrorist threats to the U.S.; raw intelligence; and medical information.”

There are several instances in which multiple cables were sent to CIA headquarters on a single day, which suggests Zubaydah was subjected to a combination of brutal interrogation methods at various points throughout the day.

For example, on Aug. 5, 2002, a four-page cable was sent to CIA headquarters describing the use of and reaction to interrogation techniques and another two-page cable was sent the same day that contained similar descriptions as well as a “medical update.” All of the other descriptions of the cables sent to CIA headquarters, some of which are as long as seven pages, during the month August 2002 contain similar descriptions.

The first set of indexes contains information about cables sent on Aug. 1, 2002 and ends on Aug. 7, 2002. The second set of indexes begins on Aug. 8, 2002 and ends on Aug. 18, 2002 but does not contain an entry for correspondence sent back to the CIA on Aug. 13, 2002 describing the status of interrogations.

The indexes were turned over as part of a contempt lawsuit filed by the ACLU against the Department of Defense related to 92 interrogation videotapes that were destroyed by the agency in 2005 as public attention began focusing on allegations that the Bush administration had subjected “war on terror” detainees to brutal interrogations that crossed the line into torture.

The CIA and the Justice Department declined to turn over a more detailed description of the cables it’s field agents sent back to headquarters citing several exemptions under the Freedom of Information Act.

“This document contains information relating to intelligence activities (including special activities), intelligence sources, intelligence methods, and foreign relations to foreign activities of the United States including confidential sources that is properly classified,” the CIA states in a document description of the Aug. 1, 2002 cable.

Additionally, the agency said it withheld a detailed description of the cables in this and every other August 2002 cable because it “contains information relating to intelligence sources and intelligence methods that is specifically exempted from disclosure” in accordance with the National Security Act. The documents also contain “information relating to the organization, functions, and names of person employed by the CIA that is specifically exempted from disclosure.”

The documents contain information relating to intra-agency predecisional deliberations, including preliminary evaluations, opinions, and recommendations of CIA personnel” and contains “information relating to the identities of personnel engaged in counterterrorism operation” and disclosing those details “would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.”

In a two-page letter accompanying the indexes, CIA Associate General Counsel John McPherson wrote that a “senior government official” would submit a declaration on May 22, “that more fully explains the justifications for withholding a more detailed description of the cables.

“We wish to note that the records at issue, which are actual operational cables between CIA station(s) and CIA headquarters are different in kind from the general legal memoranda addressing CIA interrogation methods that were disclosed on April 16, 2009,” says McPherson’s May 1, letter to Hellerstein. “Unlike the memoranda, which address the legality of interrogation methods that are no longer used, the cables disclose extremely sensitive operational information that would threaten the efficacy of present and future interrogations.

“For example disclosure of the cables could reveal how the CIA approaches interrogations as a general matter, including its strategic decisions about when particular interrogation methods were used, in what order, and, most importantly, why particular methods were used in certain situations. The cables also contain sensitive information about what types of questions are asked and at what point in the interrogation, and how interrogators calibrate particular interrogation approaches to the detainees responses.

“Even though some of those methods are no longer employed by the CIA, the cables reveal the strategy and tactics of the CIA interrogations and provide insight into how the CIA elicits information from those whom they interrogate, as well as actual intelligence obtained during interrogations. If this kind of information is disclosed, our enemies will be better prepared to resist and subvert interrogations now and in the future.”

Amrit Singh, an ACLU staff attorney, said, “it’s disappointing that the Obama administration is continuing to withhold the text of these cables despite the promise of transparency.”

She added that withholding the information may have more to do with protecting senior CIA and Bush administration officials as opposed to revealing national security secrets.

“I think the frequency of the cables showed that CIA headquarters and senior officials had sanctioned interrogation methods that were illegal,” she said. “We see no basis for continuing to withhold this information.”

The CIA stated in previous court filings that it had 3,000 documents related to the destruction of the 92 interrogation videotapes. The Justice Department said the documents include “cables, memoranda, notes and e-mails” related to the destroyed CIA videotapes, which were made between April and December 2002.

Twelve of those videotapes depict CIA interrogators subjecting Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000, to brutal interrogation methods, including waterboarding. The 80 other videotapes purportedly show Zubaydah and al-Nashiri in their prison cells. But it’s unknown whether the interrogation tapes that predate the Aug. 1, 2002 “torture” memo depict “enhanced interrogation” techniques not yet approved by the Justice Department.

The Justice Department had refused to turn over indexes for interrogations that predated the Aug. 1, 2002 memo. But last month, Hellerstein, in a two-page order dated April 20, said “the government shall produce records relating to the content of the tapes not merely from August 2002, but from the entire period the tapes were destroyed.”

“The Government represents this period to be April through December 2002,” Hellerstein’s order said. “In addition to the current plan for production from a sample month, the Government shall propose a schedule for production of documents from the entire period. The Government shall produce documents relating to the destruction of the tapes, which describe the persons and reasons behind their destruction, from a period reasonably longer than April through December 2002.”

Zubaydah, who is believed to have arranged travel for al-Qaeda operatives, was captured after a gunfight in Pakistan in March 2002 and was whisked away to a CIA “black site” prison on March 28, 2002.

Documents released last week by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that high-level Bush administration officials, including then National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney, began discussing using “enhanced interrogation” methods against Zubaydah in May 2002, suggesting that he may have been subjected to some techniques not yet authorized.

Ali Soufan, a former FBI agent who first interrogated Zubaydah shortly after he was captured, complained to officials at FBI headquarters that early interrogations of Zubaydah by the CIA amounted to “borderline torture,” according to a report released last year by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine related to the FBI’s role in harsh interrogations.

Whether Zubaydah was tortured before the Aug. 1, 2002 memo was issued has been a matter of debate for some time.

In the book, The Dark Side by New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, she suggested there was a turf war between CIA and FBI related to interrogations of “war on terror” detainees. She wrote that when CIA Director George Tenet learned that it was the FBI agents whose “rapport-building” approach resulted in valuable intelligence from Zubaydah Tenet sent in a CIA team in April 2002, led by Dr. James Mitchell, a psychologist under contract to the agency, to take over the interrogations, which became more aggressive.

Mayer wrote that when Mitchell arrived he told Soufan and the other FBI agent that Zubaydah needed to be treated “like a dog in a cage.”

Mitchell said Zubaydah was “like an experiment, when you apply electric shocks to a caged dog, after a while he’s so diminished, he can’t resist.”

Soufan and the other FBI agent argued that Zubaydah was “not a dog, he was a human being” to which Mitchell responded: “Science is science.”
The likelihood that President George W. Bush was briefed on Zubaydah’s torture was reported by journalist Ron Suskind, who wrote in his book The One Percent Doctrine that Bush had become “obsessed” with Zubaydah and the information he might have about pending terrorist plots against the United States.

“Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote. Bush questioned one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

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CIA ‘Ghost Prisoners’ Missing

Saturday, April 25th, 2009

By William Fisher |

At least three dozen detainees who were held in the CIA’s secret prisons overseas appear to be missing – and efforts by human rights organizations to track their whereabouts have been unsuccessful.

The story of these “ghost prisoners” was comprehensively documented last week by Pro Publica, an online investigative journalism group.

In September 2007, Michael V. Hayden, then director of the CIA, said, “fewer than 100 people had been detained at CIA’s facilities.” One memo released last week confirmed that the CIA had custody of at least 94 people as of May 2005 and “employed enhanced techniques to varying degrees in the interrogations of 28 of these.”

Former President George W. Bush publicly acknowledged the CIA program in September 2006, and transferred 14 prisoners from the secret jails to Guantánamo. Many other prisoners, who had “little or no additional intelligence value,” Bush said, “have been returned to their home countries for prosecution or detention by their governments.”

But Bush did not reveal their identities or whereabouts — information that would have allowed the International Committee for the Red Cross to find them — or the terms under which the prisoners were handed over to foreign jailers.

The U.S. government has never released information describing the threat any of them posed. Some of the prisoners have since been released by third countries holding them, but it is still unclear what has happened to dozens of others, and no foreign governments have acknowledged holding them.

Gitanjali Gutierrez, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), which represents Majid Khan, a former ghost detainee at Guantánamo, told IPS, “The Obama administration must change course from its ‘forward-looking’ path because it leaves too many critical questions unanswered, including those about the fate of ghost prisoners held by the United States.”

“The United States is strong enough to examine the CIA and other agencies’ activities, to punish individuals who violated our laws, and to ensure that our nation does not slip to the dark side again,” she said.

Pro Publica reported that former officials in the Bush administration said that the CIA spent weeks during the summer of 2006 — shortly before Bush acknowledged the CIA prisons and suspended the program — transferring prisoners to Pakistani, Egyptian and Jordanian custody.

The organization said the population inside the program had been shrinking since the existence of the prisons was detailed in a Washington Post article in November 2005. Renewed diplomatic relations between the U.S. and Libya in May 2006 made it possible for the CIA to turn over Libyan prisoners to Moammar Gadhafi’s control.

Joanne Mariner, director of the Terrorism and Counterterrorism Program at Human Rights Watch, said, “If these men are now rotting in some Egyptian dungeon, the administration can’t pretend that it’s closed the door on the CIA program”

“Making the Justice Department memos on the CIA’s secret prison program public was an important first step, but the Obama administration needs to reveal the fate and whereabouts of every person who was held in CIA custody,” she said.

The Red Cross has had access to and documented the experiences of only the 14 so-called “high value detainees” who were publicly moved out of the CIA program and into the prison at Guantánamo Bay.

In June 2007, human rights groups released the names of three dozen people whose fates remained unknown.

“Until the U.S. government clarifies the fate and whereabouts of these individuals, these people are still disappeared, and disappearance is one of the most grave international human rights violations,” said Margaret Satterthwaite, a law professor at New York University. “We clearly don’t know the story of everyone who has been through the program We need to find out where they are and what happened.”

In a related development, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has asked the Obama administration to make public records pertaining to the detention and treatment of prisoners held at the Bagram Airfield in Afghanistan.

The ACLU filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for records pertaining to the number of people currently detained at Bagram and their names, citizenship, place of capture and length of detention. The ACLU is also seeking records pertaining to the process afforded those prisoners to challenge their detention and designation as “enemy combatants.”

“The U.S. government’s detention of hundreds of prisoners at Bagram has been shrouded in complete secrecy. Bagram houses far more prisoners than Guantánamo, in reportedly worse conditions and with an even less meaningful process for challenging their detention, yet very little information about the Bagram facility or the prisoners held there has been made public,” said Melissa Goodman, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project.

She told IPS, “Without transparency, we can’t be sure that we’re doing the right thing – or even holding the right people – at Bagram.”

Recent news reports suggest that the U.S. government is detaining more than 600 individuals at Bagram, including not only Afghan citizens captured in Afghanistan but also an unknown number of foreign nationals captured thousands of miles from Afghanistan and brought to Bagram.

Some of these prisoners have been detained for as long as six years without access to counsel, and only recently have been permitted any contact with their families. At least two Bagram prisoners have died while in U.S. custody, and Army investigators concluded that the deaths were homicides.

“When prisoners are in American custody and under American control, no matter the location, our values and commitment to the rule of law are at stake,” said Jonathan Hafetz, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. “Now that President Obama has taken the positive step of ordering Guantánamo shut down, it is critical that we don’t permit ‘other Gitmos’ to continue elsewhere.”

The ACLU’s request is addressed to the Departments of Defense, Justice and State, as well as the CIA.

A federal judge recently ruled that three prisoners being held by the U.S. at Bagram can challenge their detention in U.S. courts, in habeas corpus suits brought by a group of human rights legal advocates.

The prisoners, who were captured outside of Afghanistan and are not Afghan citizens, have been held there for more than six years without charge or access to counsel. The Obama administration is appealing the ruling.

(Inter Press Service)

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CIA Kidnap Trial to Resume in April

Wednesday, March 18th, 2009

An Italian judge says the trial of 26 U.S. agents and seven Italians accused of kidnapping a terrorism suspect will resume next month, after the Constitutional Court clarifies key rulings in the case.

Wednesday’s hearing in Milan was postponed to April 22.

The defense claimed victory last week after the Constitutional Court ruled that state secrets had been violated in the case against the Americans. The court is expected to rule by April 22 on whether prosecutors can use any state evidence said to violate secrecy provisions.

The defendants, including the former head of Italy’s military intelligence agency Nicolo Pollari, are accused of kidnapping an Egyptian imam from Milan and flying him to Egypt. The cleric, Osama Moustafa Hassan Nasr, also known as Abu Omar, says he was imprisoned, interrogated and tortured outside Cairo.

The Americans are being tried in absentia. The Italian government has not asked for their extradition, and the CIA has refused to comment on the case.

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CIA Confirms 12 of 92 Videotapes Destroyed Showed Prisoners Tortured

Tuesday, March 10th, 2009

Heavily redacted government documents filed in a New York federal court Friday afternoon say the CIA destroyed 12 videotapes that specifically showed two detainees being tortured.

    The documents were filed in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union. In December 2007, the ACLU filed a motion to hold the CIA in contempt for its destruction of the tapes in violation of a court order requiring the agency to produce or identify all records requested by the ACLU. That motion is still pending.

    On Monday, the Justice Department revealed in court documents that the CIA destroyed 92 interrogation videotapes, which is now the subject of a criminal probe. According to Friday’s court documents, 90 tapes relate to one detainee and two tapes relate to another detainee.

    In a letter filed Friday in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, Acting US Attorney Lev Dassin said a complete list of summaries, transcripts or memoranda related to the videotapes would be filed with the court by March 20.

    ”The government is needlessly withholding information about these tapes from the public, despite the fact that the CIA’s use of torture - including waterboarding - is no secret,” said Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU. “This new information only underscores the need for full and immediate disclosure of the CIA’s illegal interrogation methods. The time has come for the CIA to be held accountable for flouting the rule of law.”

    On March 2, the Justice Department said in court documents the CIA destroyed 92 videotapes - far more than previously known - to prevent disclosure of evidence revealing how the agency’s interrogators subjected “war on terror” detainees to waterboarding and other brutal methods.

    ”The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed,” said a letter written by Acting US Attorney Lev Dassin and filed in federal court in New York. “Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed.”

    Previously, the CIA had disclosed that it had destroyed two videotapes and one audiotape of harsh interrogations of detainees. The tape destruction has been the subject of a yearlong criminal investigation by John Durham, the Acting US Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, who was appointed special prosecutor last year by Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

    In the March 2 filing, Dassin noted that a stay of a contempt motion filed by the ACLU seeking release of the tapes was allowed to expire on February 28 without a request for a continuation - signaling that Durham’s investigation is now complete.

    In January, Durham had indicated in a court filing that he expected to wrap up his probe by the end of February. The CIA has asked the court to give the agency until Friday to produce a list of all destroyed records, any memos relating to reconstruction of those records, and identification of witnesses who may have watched the videotapes before they were destroyed.

    Dassin’s letter said some information sought by the ACLU may be classified or “protected from disclosure, such as the names of the CIA employees who viewed the videotapes.”

    Dassin said the CIA “intends to produce all of the information requested to the court and to produce as much information as possible on the public record to the plaintiffs.”

    The videotaped interrogations, which were also withheld from the 9/11 Commission, were destroyed in November 2005 after The Washington Post published a story exposing the CIA’s use of so-called “black site” prisons overseas to interrogate terror suspects with techniques that were not legal on US soil.

    The Zubaydah Case

    The Post’s story focused on alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah and the harsh methods that the CIA used on him and other detainees. Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan on March 28, 2002, and was reportedly whisked to a secret prison site in Thailand for interrogation.

    Initially, Zubaydah was somewhat cooperative, but later became tight-lipped when asked about alleged terrorist plots against the United States and the whereabouts of high-level al-Qaeda operatives.

    In July 2002, a meeting was convened at the White House, where former White House counsel Alberto Gonzales, Justice Department attorney John Yoo, Vice President Dick Cheney, Cheney’s attorney David Addington, and unknown CIA officials discussed whether the CIA could interrogate Zubaydah more aggressively in order to get him to respond.

    It was at this July 2002 meeting that Yoo, Gonzales and Addington gave the CIA the green light to use a wide variety of techniques, including waterboarding, on Zubaydah and other detainees at several secret prisons to “break” them and force them to cooperate with interrogators, according to an account published in Newsweek in late December 2003.

    Less than a month after the meeting, on August 1, 2002, Yoo drafted a memo to Gonzales that was signed by Jay Bybee, the assistant attorney general in charge of the Office of Legal Counsel. That memo declared that President Bush had the legal authority to allow CIA interrogators to employ harsh tactics to extract information from detainees.

    Yoo’s memo - often called the “torture meme” - said Congress “may no more regulate the President’s ability to detain and interrogate enemy combatants than it may regulate his ability to direct troop movements on the battlefield.”

    Michael Chertoff, then head of the Justice Department’s criminal division, reportedly advised the CIA General Counsel Scott Muller and his deputy, John Rizzo, that the August 1, 2002, legal opinion protected CIA interrogators from prosecution if they used waterboarding or other harsh tactics.

    In February 2005, during his Senate confirmation hearing to become Homeland Security secretary, Chertoff said he provided the CIA broad guidance in response to its questions about interrogation methods, but never addressed the legality of specific techniques.

    Bush Fixated

    In the book “The One Percent Doctrine,” author Ron Suskind said Zubaydah was not the “high-value detainee” the CIA had claimed. Rather, Suskind wrote, Zubaydah was a minor player in the al-Qaeda organization, handling travel for associates and their families.

    However, “Bush was fixated on how to get Zubaydah to tell us the truth,” Suskind wrote. Bush asked one CIA briefer, “Do some of these harsh methods really work?”

    Zubaydah was strapped to a waterboard and, fearing imminent death, he spoke about a wide range of plots against a number of US targets, such as shopping malls, the Brooklyn Bridge and the Statue of Liberty. Yet, Suskind wrote, the information Zubaydah provided under duress was not credible.

    According to Suskind, Zubaydah’s captors soon discovered that their prisoner was mentally ill and knew nothing about terrorist operations or impending plots. That realization was “echoed at the top of CIA and was, of course, briefed to the President and Vice President,” Suskind wrote.

    Still, in public statements, President Bush portrayed Zubaydah as “one of the top operatives plotting and planning death and destruction on the United States” and added: “So, the CIA used an alternative set of procedures” to get Zubaydah to talk.

    The President did not want to “lose face,” because he had stated Zubaydah’s importance publicly, Suskind wrote.

    Last year, Mukasey appointed US Attorney Durham as special counsel to investigate whether the destruction of the CIA videotapes violated any laws, but did not give Durham the authority to probe whether the interrogation techniques themselves violated anti-torture laws.

    In December 2008, Bush and Cheney both admitted in exit interviews that they authorized the waterboarding of Zubaydah and two other detainees.

    House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers proposed expanding the scope of Durham’s investigation in January, to include a broader review of the Bush administration’s interrogation policies.

    Conyers said he urged Attorney General Eric Holder to “appoint a Special Counsel or expand the scope of the present investigation into CIA tape destruction to determine whether there were criminal violations committed pursuant to Bush administration policies that were undertaken under unreviewable war powers, including enhanced interrogation, extraordinary rendition, and warrantless domestic surveillance.”

    The Senate Intelligence Committee, chaired by Democrat Dianne Feinstein, will soon conduct a secret investigation into the CIA’s interrogation program to determine whether the methods used against detainees worked, according to published reports.

Jason Leopold

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CIA destroyed 12 harsh interrogation tapes

Sunday, March 8th, 2009

Court documents show the CIA destroyed a dozen videotapes of harsh interrogations of terror suspects.

The 12 tapes were part of a larger collection of 92 videotapes of terror suspects that the CIA destroyed. The tape destruction is now the subject of a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union against the government.

Heavily redacted papers filed in the case indicate a dozen destroyed tapes show so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The CIA’s enhanced interrogation methods are secret, but they once included waterboarding, which simulates drowning. CIA officials have said they held fewer than 100 prisoners at secret sites and used harsh interrogation methods on about one-third of them. Of those, three were waterboarded.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press

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Panetta: No one to be punished for interrogations

Friday, March 6th, 2009

Panetta: No CIA employees to be punished as a result of Senate review of harsh interrogations

CIA Director Leon Panetta says agency employees who took part in harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects are not in danger of being punished.

Panetta delivered that message to CIA employees in an e-mail Thursday, reiterating what he told Congress last month. He said then that he would oppose prosecutions of any CIA employee who adhered to their legal guidance on interrogations.

He sent the message after the Senate Intelligence Committee announced its review of the CIA’s interrogation and detention program under President George W. Bush.

The committee will look at how the CIA decided whom to interrogate, whether it told Congress the truth about the program and whether it was legal. It will also try to determine whether the harsher methods the CIA used elicited valuable intelligence.

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CIA destroyed terror interrogation tapes

Wednesday, March 4th, 2009

By Alex Spillius |

The revelation that far more tapes had been destroyed than previously acknowledged came in a letter filed by US government lawyers in New York.

The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a lawsuit seeking more details of the Bush administration’s terror interrogation programmes following the September 11 attacks.

“The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed. Ninety two videotapes were destroyed,” said the letter written by Lev Dassin, the acting US attorney.

Amrit Singh, an ACLU lawyer, said the CIA should be held in contempt of court for holding back the information for so long.

“The large number of videotapes destroyed confirms that the agency engaged in a systematic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations and to evade the court’s order,” she said in a statement.

The tapes also became a contentious issue in the trial of the September 11 conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui, after prosecutors initially claimed no such recordings existed, then after the trial was over, acknowledged two videotapes and one audiotape had been made.

The investigation found that the CIA’s videotapes included interrogations of Abu Zubaydah, once a senior aide of Osama bin Laden and held at the Guantanamo Bay detention centre, and another high-ranking member of the terrorist network. They were destroyed, in part, to protect the identities of the interrogators at a time the Justice Department was debating whether the tactics used during the sessions - which are believed to have included the “water boarding” torture technique of partial drowing - were illegal.

The letter to Judge Alvin Hellerstein said the CIA is now gathering more details for the lawsuit, including a list of the destroyed records, any secondary accounts that describe the destroyed contents, and the identities of those who may have viewed or possessed the recordings before they were destroyed.

But the agency’s lawyers also note that some of that information may be classified, such as the names of CIA personnel that viewed the tapes.

“The CIA intends to produce all of the information requested to the court and to produce as much information as possible on the public record to the plaintiffs,” the letter stated.

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